ISO 10668 in 2026: What's Changed for Brand Valuation (and What's Coming Next)

In January 2025, I wrote a detailed explainer on ISO 10668, the international standard for monetary brand valuation. That article continues to be one of the most-read pieces on my site, which tells me that brand valuation is a topic marketers and founders keep coming back to — particularly when they're preparing for fundraising, M&A, or board-level conversations about brand investment.

A lot has changed since then. Most significantly: ISO 10668 is being revised for the first time in sixteen years. The original standard was published in 2010, and in February 2026 a working group formally registered a new edition that will eventually replace it. That alone makes this update worth writing.

But the revision is only part of the story. The broader landscape around brand valuation has shifted in ways that anyone who relies on this framework should understand. AI is changing how brand strength gets measured. Brand visibility in AI search is emerging as a new dimension of brand equity. And the M&A market has made formal brand valuation more commercially relevant than at any point in the past decade.

If you're new to ISO 10668, I'd recommend reading my original article first for the foundational framework. This piece covers what's happened since, and what it means for how you think about your brand's value.

The revision: ISO 10668 is being updated for the first time since 2010

In February 2026, ISO formally approved a new project to revise ISO 10668. A working group has been assembled and a draft is being prepared. When published, it will be the first update to the standard since its original release in 2010.

The revision is at an early stage — it's been registered in the ISO work programme and the working group is drafting — so the final content isn't public yet. But the fact that ISO has initiated this process after sixteen years of the standard remaining unchanged is significant in itself. The world of brand valuation in 2026 looks nothing like it did in 2010. Digital brands, platform businesses, AI-native companies, creator-driven businesses, and subscription models all present valuation challenges that the original framework wasn't designed to address.

I'll update this article as details of the revision emerge. For now, what matters is that anyone conducting brand valuations under ISO 10668 should be aware that the standard is actively being revised, and that any valuation work done today may need to be reassessed against the new edition once it's published.

ISO 20671: the companion standard that's gained real traction

When I wrote the original piece, ISO 20671 (Brand Evaluation — Principles and Fundamentals) was relatively new and not widely adopted. That's changed noticeably.

ISO 20671 provides a framework for measuring brand strength — the non-monetary dimensions of brand value including marketing investment, stakeholder equity, and business performance impact. It was always designed to complement ISO 10668's monetary valuation, but in practice many organisations were doing one without the other.

In 2026, the two standards are increasingly used together, particularly in M&A due diligence. With global deal values reaching $4.7 trillion in 2025 and brand increasingly recognised as the primary asset in transformative acquisitions, buyers want both: a monetary valuation (ISO 10668) backed by a rigorous strength analysis (ISO 20671). The combination provides a much more defensible picture of brand value than either standard alone.

For marketers, this is worth understanding because ISO 20671 provides the link between what you do (marketing investment, brand building, customer experience) and what the brand is worth financially. If you've ever struggled to justify brand spending to a CFO or investor, ISO 20671 gives you a standardised framework that connects brand activities to financial value in a way that finance professionals can engage with.

The chair of the ISO technical committee that developed ISO 20671 put it well: finance and marketing don't speak the same language. Marketing focuses on justifying brand expenditures, and finance focuses on controlling them. ISO 20671 is designed to create common ground between the two — a theme I've been writing about recently in the context of AI marketing ROI.

How AI is changing the practice of brand valuation

ISO 10668 requires three types of analysis before arriving at a brand valuation: legal analysis, behavioural analysis, and financial analysis. AI is reshaping two of those three in meaningful ways.

Behavioural analysis

The behavioural component — understanding how stakeholders perceive and interact with the brand — has traditionally relied on surveys, focus groups, and market research. These are slow, expensive, and limited in sample size.

In 2026, AI-driven sentiment analysis and linguistic audits are increasingly supplementing or replacing traditional survey methods. Large language models can analyse millions of social mentions, reviews, forum discussions, and media references to build a behavioural picture of a brand that's both broader and more current than anything a survey can capture.

Some organisations are going further, using AI-generated synthetic respondents to simulate brand evaluation scenarios before launching campaigns. This allows for rapid testing of brand perception shifts without the months of lead time that traditional research requires.

None of this changes what ISO 10668 asks for — you still need a thorough behavioural analysis. But the tools available to conduct that analysis have transformed, and brand valuations done in 2026 should be using them. A valuation based solely on traditional survey data is no longer best practice when richer, more current data is available through AI-powered analysis.

Financial analysis

The financial component — projecting future cash flows attributable to the brand — is also being enhanced by AI. Predictive models can now process far more variables than traditional financial forecasting: real-time competitive signals, market sentiment shifts, search trend data, and customer behaviour patterns all feed into more dynamic and responsive financial projections.

For the brands I work with, this means the financial analysis component of a valuation can be more granular and more current than ever before. Instead of annual forecasts based on historical trends, AI enables rolling financial models that update as market conditions change.

The new dimension: brand visibility in AI search

This is the development that the original ISO 10668 framework couldn't have anticipated, because it simply didn't exist in 2010.

Consumers and B2B buyers increasingly use AI assistants — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews — to research products, compare brands, and build shortlists. When these AI systems describe your brand, recommend it, or fail to mention it entirely, that directly affects the behavioural and financial dimensions of your brand value.

Consider: if a buyer asks an AI assistant to recommend solutions in your category and your brand doesn't appear, you've effectively been excluded from the consideration set before any human interaction takes place. Research from earlier this year showed that brands cited in AI-generated search results earn significantly higher click-through rates than those that appear in traditional results but aren't cited by the AI summary.

More concerning: AI models can misrepresent brands. One major drinks company discovered that AI models were actively miscategorising one of their products — describing an affordable mass-market brand as a prestige product. When AI models get your brand wrong, and a growing share of buyers rely on those models for research, you have a brand equity problem that traditional valuation frameworks don't capture.

For anyone conducting a brand valuation today, I'd argue that AI search visibility should be part of the behavioural analysis. How does your brand appear in AI-generated answers? Is the information accurate? Are you being recommended alongside the right competitors? Is your brand being described in terms that align with your positioning? These are brand equity questions that directly affect the financial projections in any income-based valuation.

Whether the ISO 10668 revision will explicitly address AI-mediated brand discovery remains to be seen. But practitioners shouldn't wait for the standard to catch up. If you're valuing a brand in 2026 and not considering how it shows up in AI search, you're missing a dimension that's already affecting commercial outcomes.

What this means for founders and marketing leaders

If you're using brand valuation for fundraising, M&A preparation, or internal strategic planning, here are four practical takeaways:

Be aware that ISO 10668 is being revised. If you're commissioning a formal brand valuation, ask your valuer whether they're tracking the revision and how they expect it to affect their methodology. Any valuation done under the 2010 standard may need to be revisited once the new edition is published.

Use ISO 10668 and ISO 20671 together. A monetary valuation without a strength analysis tells you what the brand is worth today but not why, or whether that value is likely to hold. The combination gives investors and acquirers a much more complete picture — and gives you a framework for demonstrating that your marketing investment is building a financial asset, not just generating activity.

Audit your AI search visibility as part of brand health. This isn't formally required by either standard yet, but it should be part of your brand management practice regardless. Spend 20 minutes asking AI assistants about your brand and your category. The results will tell you something important about how a growing segment of your market is encountering your brand for the first time.

Connect your brand valuation work to your marketing measurement. Brand valuation shouldn't sit in a separate box from marketing analytics. The behavioural data that feeds a brand valuation — sentiment, perception, awareness, preference — is the same data your marketing team should be tracking continuously. If your marketing measurement doesn't connect to your brand's financial value, you're missing the link that makes marketing investment defensible at the board level.

What comes next

I'll update this article as the ISO 10668 revision progresses and more details become available about what the new edition will include. In the meantime, the original standard remains in force and continues to provide a sound framework for monetary brand valuation.

If you're interested in the broader topic of connecting marketing investment to financial outcomes, my article on measuring AI marketing ROI covers the framework I use with clients — and much of the thinking applies to brand valuation as well.

For the foundational explainer on what ISO 10668 is and how it works, see my original article.