The AI Search Shift Is Real — But the Vendor Playbook Is Getting Ahead of the Data
Everyone is selling AEO services. We ran the research across 15 verticals to find out what actually holds up.
A new category of marketing services called AEO — Answer Engine Optimization — has arrived, and it comes with impressive numbers. One widely cited case study reports a 1,850% increase in qualified leads. A 3x conversion rate versus traditional search. Citations in 92% of industry-relevant AI answers.
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. A study tracking Americans' search habits found that preference for traditional search engines dropped from 79.8% to 66.9% in just six months. Daily AI tool usage more than doubled in the same window. ChatGPT's share of general information searches tripled.
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 across 15 verticals found the opposite. In 12 of 15 tested searches, none of the major marketing platforms appeared in the top 10 results. 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.
An Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands found that the strongest predictor of appearing in AI answers was the volume of branded mentions across credible websites — news coverage, industry publications, community discussions, YouTube videos that name the brand. 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, 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. This currently accounts for roughly 1% of total web traffic across the industry. The third is converting those AI-referred visitors into customers — which, per available data, does happen at meaningfully higher rates than traditional search traffic, likely because people who find you through an AI recommendation are further along in their decision.
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 $1,500 per vertical.