By Mathieu Roche, CEO and Co-Founder at ID5
Identity has been evolving for years. Every signal change, every browser shift, every policy update has added another layer of complexity. And while cookies remain in Chrome, the broader ecosystem has already moved on. One of the clearest learnings from the 2025 State of Digital Identity Report is just how far that shift has progressed, with 91% of organizations having adopted or tested alternative identity solutions. That figure alone hints at a quiet but decisive identity realignment. The industry is no longer waiting for clarity from browser timelines. It is building toward a model that works everywhere, across every device, every channel, and every audience touchpoint as we move into 2026.
Yet the transition is uneven. Half of publishers still report that fewer than 30% of their users are authenticated. Logged-in environments have grown, but only modestly, and the gaps they leave behind have become more visible. Static identifiers cannot stretch far enough to cover them; especially when consumer behavior is splintered across computers, phones, tablets, gaming environments, streaming platforms, and the rest of the digital landscape. The result is a reliance on a broader set of tools. ID bridging, cross-device graphs, adaptive identifiers, clean rooms, and first-party data strategies now sit side by side. Rather than relying on a single solution, organizations are mixing and matching approaches to create continuity wherever cookies, logins, or deterministic signals fall short.
Fragmentation’s Hidden Cost
One of the most consistent lessons from 2025 is that fragmentation is not just an operational burden, it has a direct impact on performance. Fragmentation erodes match rates, and match rates determine how much of an audience can be recognized and reached. When data passes through multiple ID systems, the audience shrinks a little at each hop. What begins as a strong first-party file often ends up reaching only a fraction of its intended users. The Go Addressable, CIMM, and Truthset study put that reality into numbers, showing IP-to-email matches averaging only about 16% accuracy.
Many organizations now work with several overlapping tools, each intended to fill in a different part of the picture. But every additional partner introduces another translation point. This tension between optionality and inconsistency is why 51% of publishers now work with ID bridging partners. Bridging has become a practical way to link cookie-based and cookieless environments, and satisfaction with identity tests sits at 90%. When the bridges hold, more of the audience stays reachable.
At the same time, privacy expectations have tightened. Respondents of the digital identity report ranked secure signal acquisition and processing (27%), support for frameworks like the Global Privacy Platform (27%), and transparent data usage (20%) among the most important characteristics of any identity solution. This aligns with what regulators and consumers have come to expect. It reinforces a broader shift toward models that can scale while remaining compliant across jurisdictions. In many cases, this requires unified approaches that maintain continuity from onboarding to activation to measurement instead of relying on scattered identifiers stitched together at the last minute.
CTV Advances the Pressure
CTV is forcing these conversations into new territory. It has never relied on cookies. It is growing quickly. And it carries higher expectations for accountability. Measurement and cross-channel reconciliation emerged as the top challenges, with 67% of respondents citing them as their primary pain points. Nearly a fifth pointed to consent management as the biggest hurdle. The identification layer in CTV is still maturing and many believe it lacks adequate transparency for viewers.
The result is a channel that behaves like television in its premium nature and like digital in its demand for precision. Publishers lean heavily on first-party data strategies, deal IDs, and clean room onboarding, which respondents ranked as the most effective tools. Yet these solutions need to connect to the rest of the digital stack. Advertisers want to understand frequency across devices, attribute outcomes, and reconcile impressions across households. This is where identity graphs and adaptive identifiers have gained traction. They translate signals between systems and preserve recognition as audiences move from the web into streaming environments and beyond.
A More connected, Adaptive Future
What’s clear from the 2025 findings is a shift in mindset that will shape identity strategies in 2026. Static identifiers are losing ground. Logged-in environments are valuable, but they remain limited. Deterministic signals still matter, but respondents increasingly indicate that the right balance depends on the goal. More than half prefer a mix of deterministic and probabilistic methods. They want flexibility. They want scale when scale matters and precision when precision matters. And they are more open to AI and machine learning playing a role in reconciling scattered signals. With consumer identity spread across so many surfaces, adaptive approaches have become essential.
If 2025’s defining message was the realization that identity sits at the center of everything, 2026 will be defined by experimentation. Identity realignment is here. Organizations are building combinations of tools that can carry identity from one environment into another without losing context along the way. They are working to reduce the match-rate losses that come from fragmented supply chains, and applying lessons from the past few years to rebuild trust, create transparency, and future-proof the foundations of digital advertising.
As we head into 2026, adoption rates are high, satisfaction is increasing, and alternative identity has become part of the industry’s fabric. The next era will belong to models that can recognize audiences in privacy-safe ways, link signals across devices without sacrificing accuracy, and maintain continuity from planning to measurement. It will belong to approaches that reduce complexity instead of adding more of it. Identity is being rebuilt to meet these expectations, the challenge now is refining it so that performance, accountability, and trust can move forward together.
