Shaping the next era of publishing in 2026

As we start 2026, we’re in a world where volatility is constant, and chaos is the new normal. 

To succeed—and keep human-led content at the forefront—all of us must evolve. Let’s challenge the way we think, experiment with unconventional approaches, and stay ready to pivot when we see emerging opportunities.

What’s in store at Raptive in 2026

Fortunately, many of the industry’s sharpest people are here on the Raptive team. Behind the scenes, we’ve already accelerated years of work with our investment in data science, infrastructure, and systems designed to help you win in today’s complex environment.

This year, we aim to help you earn more from better experiences, reach audiences within and beyond search, and compete with AI without sacrificing your readers’ trust or ownership of your content.

Here’s a glimpse of how we’re bringing you more readers and revenue in the year ahead through performance, partnership, and advocacy. 

What performance means to us now

We’ll always be focused on delivering you the highest RPMs. But to us, peak performance comes from balancing ads and reader experience. 

In the old days of digital media, more ads meant more revenue. We never fully bought into that tradeoff. 

Luckily, buying systems are evolving and advertisers are placing greater value on attention and outcomes, as cleaner pages and better user experiences become a competitive advantage.

Over the past year, our investment in quality, user experience, and long-term advertiser trust paid off. We significantly reduced page bloat, improved memory usage, and mitigated mobile instability, all resulting in a measurable decrease in iPhone page crashes and stronger overall Core Web Vitals.

At the same time, our ad code and performance teams drove higher RPMs year-over-year while reducing ad density.

In 2026, this performance will continue to compound. Expect to see more ad optimizations that prioritize user experience and smarter ad placements that capitalize on larger portions of advertiser budgets. 

Our hands-on approach to partnership 

There’s no shortage of advice telling you how to adapt right now. Our role isn’t to add to that pressure. It’s to reduce it by equipping you with the tools you need to build more resilience, focus your efforts, and grow your business.

Using AI to win against AI

Creators and publishers need help as Pinterest and other platforms continue to change. Traffic declined across 2024 and 2025, especially in food, driven largely by a surge of low-quality, AI-generated content. We’re still pressuring Pinterest, but no longer waiting for a fix. We’re leveraging AI to bring you tools that help you stay competitive.

Raptive Duet is our first beta release of the year, helping you stand out, save time, and stay competitive as Pinterest evolves. With Duet, you can significantly increase their Pin output to keep up with the AI spammers, without compromising quality, originality, or trust. We plan to test and leverage more opportunities to use AI for efficiency over the course of this year.

Interested in giving us feedback as part of the product beta? Fill out this form.  

Centralizing your data for smarter next steps

This year’s roadmap transforms the Raptive dashboard from a reporting tool to a place of control. This means more options for those who want to experiment, clearer tradeoffs surfaced around revenue vs. UX vs. stability, and more transparency into why changes are happening.

We’re continuing to invest in infrastructure that enables greater autonomy without sacrificing the benefits of our programmatic expertise.

Building greater channel resilience

As discovery shifts away from traditional search, we’re expanding support for channels where trust and voice still matter: newsletters, short-form video, and social platforms that reward connection over scale. The landscape is different, but readers still want your content—and we’re exploring new ways to help them find it.

Vertical video is exploding. This is an area where you can truly differentiate from AI, and it represents a large opportunity for ad revenue. In 2026, expect more resources to get ahead on channels like YouTube, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok. We’ll also continue to explore ad formats that align with new types of content. 

Turning SEO insights into action

The landscape is changing, but we’re doing everything we can to help you get the most search traffic possible. Our Audience Growth team is scaling what we see across thousands of sites into practical guidance you can act on. 

This includes:

• Checklists that remove guesswork, like our content quality checklist, which explains what’s changed in Google’s priorities and the specific steps you can take to improve trust and performance
• Expert-led webinars that break down real opportunities as they emerge, similar to our Google Discover webinar, to share how new search opportunities work today and how to measure what’s gaining traction
• Timely, seasonal recommendations based on live performance data, including step-by-step guidance and planning tools when we identify formats with outsized traffic potential
• Plain-language strategies for navigating AI-driven search changes, focused on protecting visibility and earning back clicks, not chasing every trend

Keeping you at the heart of our advocacy

Advocating for your rights is at the core of our ethos. But in 2026, we’re shifting from volume to leverage. It’s not just raising our voices and being in the right room; it’s staying in that room, shaping standards, and pushing for frameworks that protect you.

For the fourth year in a row, Raptive is the most trusted “sales house,” an industry term for ad management company, in Jounce Media’s 2025 Seller Sentiment Survey. This credibility gives us influence with advertisers, platforms, and policymakers—and we take that responsibility seriously.

We’re pushing back on platforms’ harmful practices and partnering with companies like ProRata and Cloudflare to pioneer new frameworks where AI pays you for your work. 

A future in focus

The choices you make this year will shape the future of your business. Who you partner with, where you spend your time and energy, and what risks you take all matter. 

We’re right there with you, with renewed confidence in our mission to champion a human-centered internet and a commitment to bold innovation that brings that goal to life.

We’re not waiting to see what volatility and chaos do to the best parts of the internet you helped build, we’re taking greater control of what it becomes next—together.