Marketo Release Notes | JAN'26

What do the JAN'26 Marketo updates really mean for your team?

We break down what matters, what to act on, and where it impacts your marketing operations.

Features

• Email Designer – AI Assistant Enhancement: You can now directly add brand assets in your prompt and ask the model to refer to that source for generating content, rather than manually adding a brand asset as a file.
• Email Designer – Visual Previews for Fragments: All published Fragments now appear as thumbnails, making it much faster to identify the one you need.
• Email Designer – Bullets: You can now create multi-level bullets when authoring an email in the Email Designer.
• Email Designer – Conditional Content Enhancements: Parity with the Dynamic Content feature in the old email editor.
  • Conditional Content is now applicable to Segmentation in shared folders.
  • Segmentations are now sorted in alphabetical order.
• Email Designer – Folders: You can now organize your assets created using the Email Designer (emails, email templates, fragments) with folders.

Announcements

• SEO Feature Deprecation: On Tuesday, March 31, 2026, Marketo Engage will deprecate the Search Engine Optimization feature (SEO). If you don’t actively use SEO, you don’t have to do anything. If you have used SEO recently, you have the option of exporting your data. Learn more.
• Marketo Community Migration Complete: The new Adobe Experience League Community is now live! Several enhancements have been made to make your Marketo Community experience even better. Check it out.
• Rest API ‘access_token’ Parameter Deprecation: The access_token query parameter used to authenticate Marketo REST API calls is being deprecated and will not be available after July 31, 2026. All new and existing integrations should authenticate REST API calls using the ‘Authorization’ header, as described here.
• SOAP API Deprecation: Support for the Marketo SOAP API will end on July 31, 2026. Services which use SOAP API capabilities should be migrated to the REST API.

What this means for you and your team

AI Assistant brand asset input: useful if you already govern brand content tightly. It can reduce copy setup time, but it also increases the risk of AI-generated drift if your asset library is messy or outdated. Treat this as a productivity boost, not a replacement for review.

Fragment thumbnails, bullets, folders, and conditional content updates: these are mostly workflow and usability improvements, but they matter for scale. Faster asset identification, better organization, and parity with old dynamic content reduce admin overhead and migration friction. The biggest value is for teams managing large email libraries across regions or business units.

SEO deprecation: if you used Marketo SEO at all, this is a cleanup task, not a feature update. Export what you need now and confirm no campaigns, landing pages, or reporting processes still depend on it. For most teams, the real impact is making sure stale functionality does not linger unnoticed.

Community migration: operationally minor, but it changes where support knowledge lives. Update internal bookmarks and support runbooks so your team does not lose time searching for old community references.

REST API access_token deprecation: this is the most important announcement. Any integration still passing tokens in the URL needs remediation before July 2026. It affects security, stability, and possibly many hidden scripts or middleware flows. Audit now, because these issues are often buried in legacy automation.

SOAP API deprecation: also high priority for enterprise environments with older integrations. If you still rely on SOAP, plan a controlled migration to REST, test downstream dependencies, and allocate time for validation. This is a real technical debt issue, not a cosmetic change.