The SEOFOMO State of AI Search Optimization Report – 2026 Edition

Survey

The results are in! 171 search professionals from 36 countries answered this year’s SEOFOMO State of AI Search Optimization survey between 17 and 27 August, and there’s a lot in here… including how much has shifted since last year’s edition.

The short version: we’ve stopped arguing about whether to do AI search optimization and started actually doing it. What we still can’t do is measure it properly.

Let’s go through the most important insights:

Everyone’s getting asked about it, and now there’s money behind it

98% of respondents have had a client, manager or decision maker ask about AI search visibility, up from 91% last year. The bigger jump is budget: 69% now have it allocated, versus 38% in 2025. 61% say their investment grew during 2026, and only 1% saw it cut.

It’s not a side project anymore

75% have a dedicated AI search optimization strategy for at least some of their sites, up from 51%. 92% are tracking AI visibility and citations, up from 78%. And the share saying nobody owns this work dropped from 11% to 4%, someone’s finally in charge.

About this, Crystal Carter, Head of AI Search and SEO Communications at Wix, says:

“The evolution of AI search as a primary function, does not come as a surprise for me. There is incredible buy in from the c-suite with regards to being present in these platforms And search marketers are responding to this need. As a result, we are seeing new tools becoming commonplace, new skills being acquired, and new positions being developed. It’s an incredible time to be working in search.”

It’s still an SEO job

The SEO team leads it for 77% of respondents, basically where it was last year at 75%, and most budget still lives inside SEO. Standalone AI search budgets grew from around 5% to 15%, so they exist now, they’re just not the norm.

About this result, Nick LeRoy, SEO Consultant and founder of seojobs.com and SEOforLunch, says:

“The marketing world is divided on long term value of SEO. Many confuse SEO and AI being an “either or” proposition. It’s not. I for one, am excited and absolutely believe SEO or “growth marketing” should own AI. It’s such a hot topic that SEOs are finally getting a seat at the table… not merely asking to “do your SEO thing” before a site release/launch.”

Jono Alderson, Independent Technical SEO consultant, says:

“77% isn’t necessarily a sign that SEO has won. It might be a sign that the organisation has lost. SEO inherits visibility problems because we’re usually the people who notice when they’re broken. AI search looks like the same pattern happening again. The danger is that we build another permanent function around the symptoms: more specialists, tools, dashboards, content, optimisation. Lots of activity, while the actual reasons a brand isn’t being surfaced remain untouched. Sometimes the fix is technical – but more often it’s better messaging, stronger evidence, clearer differentiation, better products, better market fit, or simply being worth talking about. The goal shouldn’t be to turn SEO teams into AI optimisation teams. It should be to make both teams unnecessary.”

We’re optimizing across a lot of surfaces

AI search optimization is multi-platform work already: ChatGPT leads, followed by Google’s AI search surfaces and Gemini.

About this result, Tory Gray, Founder and CEO of The Gray Dot Company, says:

“In our own client work, we’ve seen the LLMs most relevant to a brand’s audience vary from one industry to the next, and even sometimes, one competitor to the next. That matters! Methods that work for one LLM are starting to diverge from – or even conflict with – methods that work for another. If you want to optimize for GEO, you have to know who you’re optimizing for, and the answer is in your data. Log files can tell you which bots are crawling which pages on behalf of which LLMs, while your internal analytics can tell you which AI referrers are contributing most to traffic and revenue. Focus on optimizing for the top performers, prioritizing the tactics that won’t harm your existing Google results (or better yet, the ones that will help them too!).”

The things people credit with actually moving the needle are the fundamentals

Expanding content to cover more relevant questions and topics, improving crawlability and accessibility, and restructuring content so answers are easier to retrieve. Nothing really new. However, AI automation and agents are now part of the day to day, producing and reworking content, researching and clustering prompts, finding opportunities, analyzing competitors, tracking visibility.

About this, Dan Petrovic, Director at DEJAN, says:

“Seeing on-page work like content expansion and restructuring ranked as top impact drivers matches what we see in our selection rate optimization experiments. Grounding snippet and full page optimization is something we obsess over at DEJAN. I’d love to see a follow-up survey or a study which probes deeply into that aspect of AI influence work. The biggest blind spot I can see is that the industry appears focused almost entirely on the live retrieval layer. Probing a model’s parametric memory for its primary bias, or the baseline confidence it holds about an entity before any search runs. Measuring that baseline weight, combined with on-page selection signals during grounding, determines whether an engine cites you or drops you.”

Measurement is where it all gets stuck

The top challenges are measuring AI search visibility reliably, understanding what actually drives it, and connecting visibility to traffic, conversions and revenue. Meanwhile, what we measure is drifting toward brand: tracking brand visibility and brand sentiment both grew year over year, while traffic and conversion/revenue metrics held steady. The work is moving, but proving what it’s worth hasn’t caught up.

About this, Bengü Sarıca Dinçer, SEO Manager from Designmodo, says:

“92% of respondents are already tracking AI visibility and citations, yet measuring that visibility reliably is still the biggest challenge. Maybe the issue isn’t just that AI search is hard to measure, but that we’re trying to measure it too literally. A user might discover a brand through AI, return later through branded search or direct, and convert with no visible AI touchpoint in analytics. So rather than chasing a perfectly attributable “AI ROI” number, I’d triangulate visibility with branded demand, returning behaviour and conversions while being clear about what’s measured and what’s inferred.”

Impact is real, but it’s small for most of us

56% report at least some positive business impact, though only 5% call it significant, 28% see none yet, and 5% report a negative impact. The share attributing more than 5% of site revenue to AI search more than doubled, from 8% to 19%. But 46% still put it at 0-5%, and 35% can’t tell what it contributes at all.

Cyrus Shepard, Founder & SEO AI Search Growth Consultant at Zippy SEO, says:

“Interestingly, the numbers tell a fascinating story about the emergence of AI search as a stand-alone discipline. 69% of respondents have allocated budget to AI search, but only 51% see a positive impact, and for many, less than 5% of site revenue is affected. And with so many people reporting difficulty measuring visibility and attribution, these are all signs of an industry in its early stages of development. In short, very few people know what they should be doing with AI, but the overwhelming pressure to do “something” drives everyone forward. I suspect the early “doers” and experimenters will be the biggest winners.”

The bottom line

AI search optimization has gone from something everyone was asking about to something teams budget for, plan for and track. Measurement and business attribution haven’t kept up, and that’s the main thing holding it back right now.

About the results, Mark Williams-Cook, from Candour and AlsoAsked, says:

“We are seeing the last vestiges of organic search being treated like a performance channel. You’ve got 69% with budget allocated, 75% with a dedicated strategy, 92% tracking visibility, but in terms of revenue share, 80% have “no idea” or it’s <5% of what can be tracked. I think it highlights how difficult attribution has become and if you take the approach of “only invest in what we can directly attribute”, you’re going to be left a long way behind.”

Thank you!

This only works because 171 of you took the time to answer honestly about work that’s still messy, hard to measure and changing every month. Thank you for that, and for sharing the survey around.

Also, big thanks to the tools that supported this year’s edition for making the survey and the giveaway possible: Similarweb, Semrush, Peec AI, Waikay, AlsoAsked, Finchling, Glippy, Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, Keyword Insights, SE Ranking and DemandSphere

Last but not least: Huge congratulations to Seb Atkinson, who won this year’s giveaway! I’ll contact you in the upcoming days to arrange access to the tools.

Now go through it yourself

What you’ve just read is the high-level view. The report itself has every question with its full answer breakdown, plus commentary from experienced AI search specialists like Lily Ray, Kevin Indig, Ray Martinez or Celeste Gonzalez working through what the numbers mean in practice, where they agree with the data, where they don’t, and what they’d do about it.

Go through the 2026 results at your own pace, then open last year’s edition alongside them. Twelve months is a long time in AI search, and seeing the two side by side tells you more than either does on its own. I’m already looking forward to what the following months will bring!

Have your clients, managers, or decision makers asked you about the company AI search visibility in the last year?

98 %

Yes

168 answers

2 %

Not yet

3 answers

Who has primary responsibility for AI Search Optimization efforts and strategy within your organization/clients?

Have your clients, managers, or decision-makers allocated a budget for AI search optimization?

How has investment in AI Search Optimization changed across your organization or clients during 2026?

Have you created a dedicated AI search optimization strategy for most of the brands/businesses you work with?

What AI search platforms / surfaces are you actively optimizing for?

Are you monitoring your site(s) AI search visibility and citations in relevant AI answers?

What metrics are you using to assess your AI search optimization efforts?

Which AI search optimization activities are you currently implementing?

Which three (3) of the AI Search Optimization activities you're currently implementing have delivered the most meaningful positive impact on your AI Search visibility so far?

What are the three (3) biggest challenges you're currently facing with AI search optimization?

What are the primary goals you've agreed with your managers, clients or decision-makers for your AI Search Optimization efforts?

Have you observed measurable business impact that you attribute at least partly to AI Search visibility?

What's the revenue share brought by AI search platforms for your brand / business site at the moment?

Which AI Search Optimization processes are you currently using AI automation or agents for?

What are the top three (3) tools you're using to optimize, monitor or measure your AI Search Optimization efforts and impact?

Aleyda Solis is an SEO and AI Search consultant and the founder of Orainti, a boutique consultancy advising some of the world's leading brands on organic growth. One of the most followed organic search specialists and most sought-after SEO and AI Search Optimization speakers, she's the maker behind SEOFOMO, the weekly newsletter read across the SEO industry, and its sister publications AI Marketers and MarketingFOMO, plus the free Learning SEO and Learning AI Search roadmaps that have helped thousands break into the field. She also runs SEOFOMO News, the SEOFOMO Meetups, and the Crawling Mondays video series and is the co-founder of Finchling, a PR story opportunities platform.
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