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.

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. 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, over 42,800 Filipino professionals have been trained.

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.

What separates the good from the great in 2026

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%.

At the same time, the traffic that AI does send is disproportionately valuable. ChatGPT referrals convert at 7.1%, second only to paid search. 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".

Dan Petrovic (DEJAN, Australia) has gone further than anyone in treating AI search as a science, coining Selection Rate Optimization. Peec AI (Berlin) built the measurement layer, tracking Generative Share of Voice. Andrew Holland (JBH, UK) frames modern SEO as a visibility system rather than a ranking exercise.

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.