What's Really Driving the Influencer Shift in 2026
In 30 seconds
Farewell to shallow partnerships and spray-and-pray celebrity endorsements. The algorithm is burying them, even if they weren’t officially dead yet.
What's replacing them? In short, far more interesting stuff. Private communities, deeper and more credible creator relationships, and the most influential "influencers" of all (scroll for the reveal...)
Also, for the love of all that’s holy, it’s time brands optimised their whole social media feed, rather than letting influencers do all the heavy lifting. It’s not just a “nice to have” any more – it’s essential.
We're nearing the end of January, which means everyone’s LinkedIn has been drowning in 2026 predictions.
If, like us, you've noticed the 47,000 influencer marketers declaring that 2026 is "the year of long-term creator partnerships’, it’s important to note that they're not wrong. But they are just missing about 80% of the story.
Because yes, longer contracts are part of what’s going to happen this year. And brands should absolutely invest in sustained relationships (though you'd expect influencer marketers to say that, wouldn't you? It makes their lives infinitely simpler). But that's not what's interesting now.
What IS interesting is that the entire concept of influence is changing. Not just fragmenting or evolving or whatever other vague descriptor you want to throw at it. This is partly because the way we interact with influencers is maturing. But it’s also because the platforms, the algorithms, and the tools we're using are all shifting. We're interacting with more sources of influence than ever, and we're using them differently. Most 2026 prediction posts aren't even cognisant of just how much the currents are changing.
So, what is 2026 really going to bring to the world of influencer marketing?
1. The death of broadcasting and the rise of the little internet
While scouring LinkedIn, you'll likely have seen the same observation repeated ad nauseam: nano and micro-influencers are where it's at now. Better engagement rates. More authentic connections. Blah blah blah.
And yes, it's true. Nano-influencers now represent 75.9% of Instagram's influencer base and 87.68% of TikTok's, with 73% of brands favouring micro and mid-tier creators over celebrity partnerships. But this isn't news. It's been true for years.
What is new is what's happening next: influencers are bringing their audiences into private spaces. And these spaces are fundamentally changing how influence works.
35% of creators are now engaging fans via exclusive access to content or private communities, with audiences actively seeking deeper connections and more security in gated spaces. Instagram broadcast channels. Substack newsletters. Private WhatsApp groups around specific brands. Discord servers. Fan-only spaces that are deliberately hard to find if you're not already in the know.
Many of these spaces aren't even led by influencers anymore. They're egalitarian communities shaped by the members themselves, where the conversation has more value than any individual voice.
Think about it: for years, it's become easier and easier to share what you love on the internet. But the result is complete homogenisation of taste. Restaurants that blow up on TikTok become impossible to get into. Everything gets flattened by virality.
As Jem Leslie, Senior Strategist at Bottle, explains: "We're seeing influencers actively talking about gatekeeping things now. On the big internet, that's an engagement killer. But in these smaller, closed-off communities, it's power. It’s about creating spaces where people who are genuinely similar to each other can find one another."
Part of this is down to platform mechanics. TikTok "communities" aren't actually communities in the traditional sense. They're hashtags. There's no static landing page where you go to hang out, no clear sense of who's in and who's out, no real community culture that develops independently of TikTok's general vibe. Compare that to Facebook Groups, which (for all their faults) actually created spaces with their own cultures and familiar faces.
Instagram broadcast channels have quietly grown into something genuinely powerful for this reason. They land in your DMs like a message from a friend, creating intimacy at scale without being fully public. Substack's massive growth over the past year tells the same story. People want to feel like they're part of something smaller, more intentional, more theirs.
The smart money isn't just chasing smaller creators for better engagement rates anymore. Brands are recognising that influence increasingly happens in private, in spaces they can't easily access or control. And that's not a bug. That's the entire point.
2. Personality becomes the premium in an AI-saturated world
While the micro-influencer economy thrives on intimacy (and big influencers are finding ways to create that intimacy through private channels too), something equally interesting is happening at the top end: major creators are moving towards genuinely integrated roles.
By 2027, 80% of enterprise marketers will integrate influencer marketing into their strategy mix, with influencers increasingly taking on strategic advisory, creative direction, and co-creation roles. Brands are building official creator councils, inviting major names to shape products from conception rather than just promote finished goods.
The reason this shift matters now is (unsurprisingly) thanks to AI again.
In 2025 alone, we watched AI-generated social content evolve from uncanny valley territory (easy to spot, vaguely unsettling) to genuinely difficult to distinguish from reality. We're now seeing entirely AI-generated UGC creators being deployed in social ads all the time. And they are scarily lifelike.
When it’s this easy to get someone to endorse your product, having human quirks becomes a premium. Real people with genuine personalities and something interesting to say. With the kind of weirdness you can only get from being real – this is what distinguishes genuine recommendations from slop.
It’s also what makes you memorable. Remember Francis Bourgeois, the train enthusiast, partnering with Gucci and The North Face in 2022? Three years later, we're still talking about that campaign. This is because those brands found someone with genuine passion and an unusual perspective, then built a campaign around that uniqueness. Francis made mainstream news for his enthusiasm about trains. People like him for him. Personality is the premium now - and that's what brands are learning to tap into.
Fashion influencers for fashion brands isn't dead, but we will see strategies evolve. You still need people who know their craft. The shift is towards credibility paired with personality. Beauty influencers who genuinely understand ingredients and can explain what niacinamide actually does (beyond the meaningless science-adjacent language you get in TV adverts). Creators who've built real relationships with their audiences, who engage in comments, who've demonstrably learned their craft and have actual insight to share.
These in-vertical creators will build credibility. Then the striking personalities, whose connection to the product is more unusual, build memorability. Both types of influencer collaborations are more than the sum of their parts. Combine them in a multifaceted influencer campaign and you have genuine brand building.
Build co-creation of products into this, and you have the full funnel. The shift from spokesperson to co-creator unlocks campaigns that feel less like advertising and more like cultural moments. Enthusiasts with esoteric personal brands collaborating on campaigns that make you stop scrolling – and actually potentially talking about it yourself - because they're genuinely interesting.
3. Credibility becomes an imperative like never before
There's another dimension to this shift that deserves its own spotlight, particularly in sectors where trust isn't just “nice to have”.
In healthcare, insurance, finance (your money or your life categories, essentially), we're watching brands bring in genuinely credible experts not as spokespeople but as strategic partners who shape the entire approach.
As Jamie Wilson, Senior Account Director at Bottle, explains: "We're partnering with actual GPs, with experts in liability, with people who have genuine credentials and deep subject knowledge. The beauty of working with someone who really knows their stuff, who isn't just parroting things they found on the internet, is that they come to you with insights that weren't previously on the internet at all. They give you the anecdotes and story richness you only get through genuine expertise. That has massive value for PR. It means journalists actually pick up our stories - but it also matters enormously for trust."
When AI can summarise everything that's already out there with remarkable ease, having someone with a unique perspective becomes exponentially more valuable.
This matters profoundly for influencer marketing too. People's experience of influence is maturing. Audiences are getting wiser to the fact that just because someone dresses up on TikTok with a stethoscope doesn't mean their medical advice is necessarily accurate. It's been a few years of this kind of content now, and people are becoming considerably savvier.
For brands, particularly in sectors where poor advice could genuinely harm people, this creates both a responsibility and an opportunity. If you're concerned your audience isn't wise to credibility gaps, it's your job as the expert in your space to address it directly. And doing that well builds profound trust.
We're seeing brands treat influencers (particularly in B2B and YMYL spaces) as strategic partners who bring platform expertise and audience insight alongside genuine subject matter knowledge. Not just a large follower count. Real expertise paired with the ability to communicate it compellingly.
4. Channel consistency will transform influencer campaigns
Most marketers think about influencer partnerships like this: influencer posts content, audience sees it, audience clicks through, audience converts. Job done.
But that's not how it works.
Think about what happens when someone sees brilliant influencer content that piques their curiosity about your brand. They don't immediately head to your website and purchase. They investigate. And that investigation happens in micro-moments, on the same platform, before you've even had a chance to think about website traffic or conversion metrics.
They click through to your brand's profile. And if what they find there doesn't align with what made them interested in the first place, you've lost them.
This is where most brands mess up influencer partnerships – and where the best brands will grow in 2026. Too often, brands obsess over the creator's content, negotiate the brief, approve the posts... but then they'll overlook the fact that their own brand presence on that platform is jarringly disconnected from what the influencer is saying.
Our Senior Strategist Jem wrote about this exact problem when Converse's creator partnership with Amelia Dimoldenberg spectacularly flopped. Brilliant creator, massive audience, fun creative concept. But a fundamental misunderstanding of how audiences actually discover and interpret YouTube content meant the entire campaign fell flat.
This is even more important as we step into 2026.
As John Drake, Senior Strategist at Bottle, explains: "People's discovery journeys aren't linear anymore. They'll spot something on TikTok, deep-dive on YouTube, check Reddit for honest opinions, maybe ask ChatGPT for a comparison, then finally land on your brand profile. If you're only thinking about that last touchpoint, you're missing about 80% of the journey. And if there's a massive disconnect between what the influencer's saying and what your brand's actually showing, that's where trust collapses."
Your brand's profile needs to feel like a hub where it's immediately clear who you are and what you stand for. That clarity doesn't just prevent influencer partnerships from failing. It actually greases the wheels for them to work better. It drives organic UGC too: being someone who discovers a new brand and flies the flag for it is genuinely exciting for certain types of people. Those are often your core community members.
Lots of marketers talk about “consensus” right now, when discussing how AI learns about your brand. We want all the touchpoints (social media, website, press coverage) saying similar things so AI systems build a coherent understanding of who you are. But for influencer marketing, you need to start much closer to home. Think about how your messaging comes across through the micro touchpoints on the same channel. That's where trust is built or broken in those critical first moments.
Now, a caveat. This doesn't mean you need a perfectly polished, influencer-level social presence before you can work with creators. Not every brand has the resource to make their profile look as cool as the influencers they're partnering with, and that's fine.
What matters is being thoughtful about the journey. If someone clicks through from an influencer's content to your profile, what will they find? At minimum, make sure your product is clearly visible, delete anything genuinely confusing or off-putting, and be comfortable with what's there. You don't need perfection. You need coherence.
As John explains: "Sometimes you're working with a slightly imperfect setup, and that's just the reality of resource constraints. For some brands, the influencer content deliberately targets a totally different demographic than their core audience on their owned channels. You can't create separate profiles for every audience segment. What you can do is make sure that when someone lands on your profile, they understand what you are, even if the vibe isn't perfectly matched. Don't let the pursuit of perfect channel consistency stop you from doing good influencer work. Just be intentional about it."
The point isn't that imperfect channel consistency should stop you from working with great creators. It's that you need to be aware of the journey, make deliberate choices about what trade-offs you're comfortable with, and do what you can within your constraints to minimise jarring disconnects.
An influencer partnership isn't a standalone tactic. It's the opening move in a discovery journey that spans multiple surfaces. Every touchpoint needs thought.
Basically, get your house in order before you invite guests over. It doesn’t need to be a full reno if you don’t have the cash, but a quick hoover will definitely help.
5. AI will become the biggest influencer
While most influencer marketers spent 2025 having collective anxiety attacks about AI-generated images and deepfake creators (and yes, even in this article we've talked about how that's affecting what we prioritise in influencer marketing), we’d argue the real AI influencer stealing their lunch was arguably ChatGPT all along.
Think about what an influencer actually does. They build trust. They make recommendations. They vouch for brands. They guide decisions based on their perceived expertise and credibility. People follow their advice because they believe this person knows what they're talking about.
Sound familiar?
That's exactly what AI chatbots do. They recommend products. They compare brands. They synthesise reputation signals from across the web and present you with what they've determined are the most trustworthy options. AI chatbots have been shown to shift preferences and opinions more effectively than traditional advertisements, with a single interaction capable of moving decisions by several points.
As Amy Kimber, Account Director at Bottle, notes: "People talk about AI like it's mystical, but trust in AI is built the same way human trust is, through consistent, credible, third-party validation. AI chatbots earn trust by recommending brands with strong reputations across multiple trusted sources. Which, incidentally, is exactly what good digital PR builds. It's the same mechanics as human influence, just operating at a different scale."
How can you ensure the AI chatbots trust your brand? luckily, we wrote an article on what we know about the factors driving visubility in AI and LLMs here.
For years, marketers have talked about how social platforms are functioning as search engines and then some. It doesn’t just provide the answer to your search, it provides the idea or conversation that prompted it. This extends that logic to AI systems. ChatGPT isn't just answering questions. It's vouching for brands, making recommendations, and earning trust by consistently pointing people towards better options. That's influence. It's just not human influence.
As Jas Maguire, Account Director at Bottle, puts it: "Your digital PR work, your social presence, your third-party validation, they're not separate. They're interconnected signals that determine which brands to trust and recommend. Just like a person would check multiple sources before trusting an influencer's recommendation, AI is doing the same thing across thousands of sources."
Think back to what we said about channel consistency. We talked about how your brand profile needs to feel coherent when someone clicks through from an influencer's content. The same principle applies to AI. When an AI system encounters your brand across TikTok, your website, Reddit discussions, press coverage, and Instagram, it's building a picture of who you are. If those signals are consistent and credible, you get recommended. If they're inconsistent or absent, you don't.
This isn't just about views. It's about becoming part of the knowledge base that shapes your industry.
In 2026, the smartest brands will stop thinking about "optimising for AI" as some mysterious separate discipline and start recognising it for what it is: building the same credibility, consistency, and third-party validation that makes human influencers trustworthy. Just across more surfaces, with more data points, to influence the ultimate meta-influencer that's aggregating everyone else's opinions.
What this means for your 2026 strategy
If you're still treating influencer marketing as a separate channel from your broader discovery strategy, time to get your skates on and join the rest of us in 2026. The smartest brands will be doing in this:
1. Building private community strategies alongside public reach
The rise of gated spaces, broadcast channels, and invitation-only communities means brands need to think beyond public social feeds. Consider how you can create or participate in more intimate spaces where deeper connections form. This doesn't mean buying your way into private Discord servers. It means understanding where your most engaged audiences are gathering and finding authentic ways to add value.
2. Prioritising personality and credibility over follower counts
In an AI-saturated world, human authenticity is the premium. Partner with creators who have genuine expertise and distinctive personalities, not just large audiences. In YMYL and B2B sectors especially, credible experts who bring unique perspectives matter more than generic reach. Look for creators who can offer insights that aren't already synthesised across the internet.
3. Getting your house in order before inviting influencers in
Your brand's own social presence needs to be coherent, consistent, and compelling before you invest in creator partnerships. Audiences will investigate your profile on the same platform where they saw the influencer content. If what they find is disconnected or weak, you've lost them before any conversion mechanics even kick in. Channel consistency within platforms matters just as much as consistency across them.
4. Treating AI as your most important "influencer"
Every piece of content you create, every social presence you maintain, every piece of press coverage you earn is teaching AI systems what to think about your brand. Make sure you're building consistent, credible signals. AI recommendations will increasingly shape purchase decisions, and brands that understand this will have the advantage.
5. Moving from one-off campaigns to sustained, strategic partnerships
47% of brands are focusing on long-term relationships with influencers, and they're right to. But it's not just about contract length. It's about treating creators as strategic partners who bring platform expertise, audience insight, and genuine subject knowledge. Let them help to shape strategy, not just execute briefs. Involve creators in the thinking, not just the posting. They’re good at it.
6. Recognising that influence happens across ecosystems, not in silos
Your customers experience influence from traditional creators, AI recommendations, peer discussions on Reddit, reviews, press coverage, and your own brand presence as one interconnected journey. Start thinking about how all these signals work together to build trust and recognition. Modern discovery is messy, multi-platform, and non-linear. Your strategy needs to cope with that.
The Bottle perspective
We've been treating influencer marketing as part of a broader discovery ecosystem for a while now. Not because we're visionaries, but because it's kinda obvious to anyone paying attention.
Your customers don't think in channels. They don't separate "influencer content" from "brand content" from "AI recommendations". They experience it as a holistic discovery journey that spans multiple platforms and touchpoints.
The brands that'll thrive are the ones that understand this fluidity. That can orchestrate campaigns across traditional PR, social presence, creator partnerships, and the signals that feed AI systems. That recognise influence isn't about follower counts, it's about trust, credibility, and consistent quality across every surface your audience encounters.
That's not influencer marketing. That's integrated brand building. And it's exactly where we operate.
Want to talk about building an influence strategy that works across the entire ecosystem? Get in touch.