The AI Search Shift Is Real, But the Vendor Playbook Is Getting Ahead of the Data

A new category of marketing services called AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) has arrived, and it comes with impressive numbers. HubSpot's own April 2026 case study reports a 1,850% increase in qualified leads. A 3x conversion rate versus traditional search. 92% of its industry-solutions pages cited by answer engines.

If you have touched marketing in the last six months, someone has probably sent you one of these numbers.

We decided to find out how many of them hold up.

Foragentis ran original research across 15 verticals in April 2026, testing real search behavior, real Google results pages, and real data on what makes brands show up in AI answers. The full findings are in the State of AEO and GEO in 2026 report. Here is what we found.

The shift is happening: just not as fast as the vendors say

Search behavior is genuinely changing. HigherVisibility's two-wave 2025 study of American search habits found 79.8% preferring traditional search engines for general information in its February wave, and measured Google's own share of those same queries at 66.9% in August, down from 73% in February. Those two figures count different things, a category of engines in one case and Google alone in the other, so the six-month move the study actually supports is Google's six points. Daily AI tool usage more than doubled over the same six months, from 14% to 29.2%. ChatGPT's share of general information searches tripled, from 4.1% to 12.5%.

So the trend is real. What is less clear is how fast it is moving and what to actually do about it.

Here is the part most vendor content leaves out: buyers are not yet searching for products and services through AI at scale. The searches that produce commercial decisions, "best CRM for small business," "marketing agency for dental practices," "social media management tool," are still overwhelmingly happening on Google. The shift toward AI search is real. The narrative that it has already happened is not.

Your competitors have not locked up the SERP

One of the most repeated claims in marketing strategy circles right now is that companies like Semrush, HubSpot, and Ahrefs have taken over the search results for anything marketing-adjacent, and that smaller brands need to find workarounds because the major players own the top of the funnel.

Our research found the opposite. Across 15 benchmark searches spanning five verticals, 12 of the 15 returned no major marketing platform anywhere in the top 10 organic results. A second run, across five sophisticated B2B verticals, found the pattern holding unevenly rather than universally: tool vendors showed up in Software/QA but not in Healthcare, Finance, Higher Education or Nonprofit. A third run, across five local-service verticals, found something else again, that queries about SEO benchmarks were more vendor-crowded than queries about marketing statistics at the same level of buying intent. The search landscape in most verticals is contested by specialist agencies, trade publishers, and mid-size content producers, not by the giants.

This matters because it means the path to ranking in your vertical is more open than the received wisdom suggests. If you have been told that the SERPs in your space are too competitive to fight for, that conclusion may be based on looking at the wrong searches.

What actually gets brands cited by AI

When ChatGPT, Claude, or Google's AI Overview answers a question and names specific brands or sources, what predicts which brands get named?

The honest answer, based on the best independent research available, is: brand authority. Not technical SEO tricks. Not schema markup. Not being first to publish about a topic.

Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found that the signal correlating most strongly with appearing in AI Overviews was the volume of branded mentions across the web, at 0.664, well ahead of backlinks at 0.218, referring domains at 0.295 and domain rating at 0.326. A follow-up Ahrefs study in December 2025 extended the analysis to ChatGPT and AI Mode and found YouTube mentions correlating more strongly still, at roughly 0.737. These are correlations, not causal estimates, and neither study tracked brands over time, so the direction of the effect is not settled. The brands that AI systems cite are the brands that the internet already talks about.

This has a practical implication that most AEO vendor content does not highlight: the path to AI visibility runs through brand building, not through technical optimization. The technical work still matters, and it is worth doing. But the brands that will dominate AI search results in two years are the ones investing in earned coverage, community presence, and content authority right now.

The measurement problem nobody is talking about

The impressive case study numbers, 1,850% lead lifts and 3x conversion rates, obscure an important distinction. There are actually three different things that "AI search visibility" can mean, and they behave completely differently.

The first is being cited in AI answers. This builds brand awareness and compounds over time, but it does not directly produce website traffic. The second is getting clicks from AI answers to your website. Conductor's 2026 Benchmarks Report measures this at roughly 1.08% of total web visits. The third is converting those AI-referred visitors into customers. The case studies claiming a premium here, HubSpot at 3x and Webflow at 6x, are vendor-reported and have not been independently validated, so treat the premium as plausible and unproven rather than established.

These three things can move independently. A brand can be heavily cited without getting much traffic. A brand can get AI-referred traffic that bounces because the landing page does not match what the AI said about them. Measuring all three as a single "AI visibility score", which is what most vendor dashboards do, hides which one is actually working.

What to do with this

The shift toward AI search is real, and early positioning matters. The brands that will be visible when buyers fully migrate to AI search surfaces are the ones building brand presence and content authority now, not the ones buying AEO audits in 2027 after the territory has been claimed.

That is the thesis behind Foragentis and ForIntel. We publish independent research because independent research, with real data, disclosed methodology, and honest uncertainty, is what builds the kind of domain authority and brand mention density that AI systems cite. We are building the position we are advising clients to build.

Read the full State of AEO and GEO in 2026

If you want vertical-specific intelligence, what the search landscape actually looks like in your market, where the AI Overview opportunities are, and where your competitors are weak, ForIntel custom reports start at $649 per vertical.

FAQ

What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?

AEO is the practice of optimizing your content so it gets cited inside answers from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overview: the AI summaries that now appear at the top of many search results. The goal is being named in those answers, not just ranking on the page below them.

Does schema markup improve AI Overview visibility?

The evidence is mixed. Google's own documentation says no special schema is required for AI Overview inclusion. Independent research found that brand mentions across credible websites correlate more strongly with AI visibility than schema markup does. Schema is worth implementing, but it is probably not the lever most AEO vendors imply it is.

What actually predicts whether a brand gets cited by AI systems?

Brand authority is the strongest correlate. Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found branded web mentions correlating most strongly with AI Overview visibility, at 0.664, against 0.218 for backlinks. A December 2025 follow-up extended the analysis to ChatGPT and AI Mode and found YouTube mentions stronger still, at roughly 0.737. These are correlations rather than causal estimates. The brands AI systems cite are the brands that are already widely talked about, not necessarily the ones with the best-optimized schema.

Are buyers already using AI search instead of Google?

They are starting to. HigherVisibility's two-wave 2025 study measured Google's share of general information searches at 66.9% in August, down from 73% in February, and found daily AI tool usage more than doubling over the same six months, from 14% to 29.2%. The shift is real and accelerating, but it is not complete: most buyers still use Google as their primary search surface.

Should I invest in AEO now or wait?

The brands that will be cited by AI systems in 18 months are the ones building brand presence and content authority now. The window between vendors talking about AEO and buyers actively searching for products via AI is exactly when building foundations costs least and pays most. Waiting until the shift is obvious is waiting until the competitive advantage is gone.