The Digital Marketers to be Followed in the Philippines, Right Now

The numbers first, because they explain everything else.

The Philippines has 98 million internet users as of late 2025, an 83.8% penetration rate against a global average of 73.2%. Social media identities hit 95.8 million, up 10.3% in a single year - the fastest-growing digital indicator in the country. Smartphone ownership sits at 98.6%. Filipinos spend nearly 34 hours a week on social platforms, and over 40 hours a month on TikTok alone. Consumer ecommerce spend reached PHP 487.5 billion in 2025.

That is the raw material Filipino marketers work with. A population with a median age of 26.1, almost entirely online, buying weekly (56.3% make at least one online purchase per week), and doing its banking on GCash. No other market in Southeast Asia looks like this.

“The question is who is actually good at converting that attention into business.”

Sean Si

Sean Si started doing SEO in 2009, when the discipline barely existed here. He built SEO Hacker into a 60-plus person agency in Parañaque with a client roster that includes Toyota, PLDT, Smart, BDO and Unilever - and he did it while blogging publicly about nearly every tactic he used. The SEO Hacker blog pulls over 40,000 readers a month.

That transparency mattered more than the client list. A generation of Filipino SEOs learned the trade from his free content before paying for anything. He also runs Qeryz, Sigil and Workplays, and teaches a structured SEO course through Nas Academy that feeds graduates into his own hiring pipeline.

The test for Sean in 2026 is the same test facing every SEO veteran: whether the playbook survives the shift to AI answers. His recent writing has moved toward AI search and localized SEO for LLMs, which suggests he sees it coming.

Janette Toral

She launched DigitalFilipino.com in 1999 and lobbied for the E-Commerce Law (RA 8792) that made online business legally possible in this country. She has been called the mother of Philippine e-commerce law.

She ran the country's first sponsored podcast series in 2006, organized digital marketing summits in Cebu when nobody else would, and personally trained thousands of MSMEs on selling online - including three mentoring batches run right here in Cebu between 2016 and 2017.

“Every Shopee seller and every TikTok Shop merchant operates inside infrastructure she helped build.”

Art Policarpio

Art founded one of the first mobile marketing agencies in the Philippines in 2003. He has since built and exited three digital startups and now runs Emporia Group, focused on e-commerce and AI-powered growth. Through Certified Digital Marketer, the training institution he helped lead, over 42,800 Filipino professionals have been trained, drawing on a bench of more than 250 practitioner-instructors and corporate clients from the Top 1,000 Philippine corporations and the Fortune 500.

Twenty-two years of staying ahead of each platform shift is rarer than it sounds. Most digital marketers get one era right. He has managed four.

Glen Dimaandal

Glen founded GDI (Search Works) after managing digital programs at two Fortune 500 companies in the US. He is probably the most technically rigorous search marketer in the country, and one of the few Filipino SEOs regularly asked to speak on strategy rather than tactics. His competencies run across SEO, SEM, e-commerce SEO and direct response copywriting.

What separates the good from the great in 2026

Here is the uncomfortable context every marketer on this list is now operating in.

Zero-click searches reached 58.5% of US queries in 2025. When Google's AI Mode is active, 93% of sessions end without a click. Google AI Overviews now appear in roughly half of tracked queries, and when they show up, clicks to the top-ranking page drop by 58%. Gartner projected a 25% decline in traditional search volume by 2026, and the behavioral data is tracking that direction.

At the same time, the traffic that AI does send is disproportionately valuable. ChatGPT referrals convert at 7.1%, second only to paid search and well above the 2.8% typical of organic Google traffic. AI referral traffic is still only about 1% of total web traffic, but it grew 527% in a year.

“The new competitive question is not ‘do we rank’ but ‘does the machine remember us’.”

The best marketers globally have already reorganized around this. A few worth studying:

Dan Petrovic (DEJAN, Australia) has gone further than anyone in treating AI search as a science. His team coined Selection Rate Optimization, the discipline of getting your content selected by the model rather than ranked by the algorithm. One experiment asked Google's Gemma model to “name 100 brands at random” 14,044 times to map which brands occupy memory inside the model itself.

Peec AI (Berlin) built the measurement layer for this era. Launched in early 2025, it hit €650K ARR within four months by tracking a metric that did not exist three years ago: Generative Share of Voice - how often a brand appears when ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini answer buyer questions. One finding: 40–60% of domains cited by AI engines change every month.

Andrew Holland (JBH, UK) spent 17 years as a police detective before marketing, and it shows. He frames modern SEO as a visibility system rather than a ranking exercise: search engines and AI models are interpreting meaning, trust and entity relationships across the entire web.

The takeaway for Filipino marketers: the local names above earned their reputations mastering the Google era. The ones who stay on this list will be the ones doing what Petrovic, Peec and Holland are doing - measuring and engineering their clients' presence inside AI answers, not just on results pages. Ahrefs found that 28.3% of the pages ChatGPT cites most have zero Google visibility.

“Ranking and being cited are now different games. Play both.”

Next on CebuSummit: the community leaders who built the Philippine marketing industry's connective tissue.