State ofSearch 2027

The Search Investment Decisions Ahead

Traditional search traffic is under pressure while AI search becomes part of the plan. In SEJ's survey, 43% of respondents plan to prioritize optimization for AI answer engines during the next year.

Measurement has some catching up to do. Only 9% feel very confident measuring and interpreting AI visibility. At the same time, 42% expect their overall SEO investment to increase and another 39% expect it to hold steady.

The report follows the decisions search leaders now face: how to read changing traffic, where to move resources, how to measure AI visibility, and which work still depends on human judgment.

What Happened

Search Is Sending Fewer, Better-Qualified Visitors

How would you describe your organization's organic search performance over the past 12 months?

Forty percent of respondents said their organic search performance declined over the past year: 24% moderately and 16% significantly. Twenty-seven percent stayed roughly flat. Meaningful improvement was reported by 29%, while 4% described the year as too volatile to characterize.

What actually happened to your organic traffic relative to leads and conversions?

Traffic tells only part of the story. Twenty-five percent saw traffic decline while leads or conversions held or improved. Another 14% had flat traffic with improving conversions.

Together, those groups account for 39% of respondents who generated equal or better business results from fewer or roughly equal visits.

The most likely explanation is a more qualified traffic mix. AI Overviews and answer engines now satisfy many casual, informational searches before a click happens. People with a stronger reason to visit a site still click through. A smaller audience can therefore produce the same number of leads, or more, when a larger share arrives with real intent.

This pattern shows up often enough to change how search performance should be read. Sessions once served as a convenient stand-in for value because traffic and conversions moved together more closely; that relationship has weakened.

“This is the clearest signal yet that the visitor who never arrived was probably never going to convert in the first place. Solved knowledge is increasingly answered within these platforms before any opportunity to click into a site is presented, so whoever still reaches the site is closer to the bottom of the funnel. We should stop focusing on sessions and “clicks” and really concentrate on what matters: leads, conversions, and revenue.”

Alex Moss, Yoast Principal SEO

The results vary across the sample. Fifteen percent lost both traffic and conversions. Another 13% saw traffic grow while leads or conversions stayed flat or declined, and 10% reported both measures flat. Sixteen percent saw both grow. The remaining 8% lacked the tracking needed to answer precisely.

Those groups expose the limits of traffic as a headline number because sessions can move in either direction without revealing commercial performance.

“Stable or improving conversions alongside declining traffic may indicate that the remaining search visitors have stronger intent, but that should not automatically be treated as a win. For many news publishers, traffic itself is often the product, and for brands, losing upper-funnel visibility can reduce awareness and future demand. Better conversion rates today do not necessarily offset a shrinking audience over time.”

- John Shehata, NewzDash CEO and Founder

A useful leadership dashboard starts with qualified conversions, pipeline contribution, attributable revenue, and cost. Track lead quality, close rates, average deal value, and conversion rate. Those numbers show whether a smaller audience is becoming more valuable.

Traffic explains your brand’s reach in broad strokes. Pay attention to traffic acquisition data to help guide investment decisions about which channels to pursue. Track user journeys to understand which inbound channels and content converts into leads.

Teams with falling traffic but steady leads should identify the pages, topics, branded queries, and conversion paths producing that resilience. The areas producing leads deserve protection. They may also reveal which lost visits carried little commercial value.

Teams with growing traffic and weak conversions need the same scrutiny. The growth may be low-intent visitors who arrive for a definition or a quick answer. Landing pages are worth a look as well. A page that ranks for a broad question can leave the reader with no clear next step in the customer journey.

Done right, search optimization can deliver the same business value on fewer visits. Leaders who measure that value directly will make better budget decisions than those still treating every lost visit as a lost opportunity.

What Is Driving the Change

AI Overviews and Zero-Click Search Are Reshaping Performance

How has the expansion of AI Overviews and zero-click search affected your organization?

Fifty-eight percent report a negative impact from AI Overviews and zero-click search: 32% call the effect moderate and 26% call it significant. Another 18% report no clear effect, 13% report a net-positive impact, and 11% say it is too early or difficult to measure.

How Organizations Are Responding

Search Budgets Are Holding Despite AI Pressure

Do you expect your organization's SEO investment to change over the next 12 months?

Investment plans remain strong. Forty-two percent expect SEO investment to increase, and 39% expect it to stay the same. Eleven percent are unsure, while 8% expect a decrease. Four out of five organizations are therefore holding or adding support.

The response from companies experiencing the most pain is especially telling. Among respondents reporting significant negative impact, 44% plan to increase investment, 28% plan to hold steady, 16% plan to decrease, and 12% remain unsure.

“As an industry we are feeling the squeeze – traffic is going down, but requirements to justify spend on organic search is increasing. However, one key part of the equation that we often forget is that traffic to your website costs money. Server costs, analytics platforms, website security; they all cost a business more if the volume of visitors increases. What we need to do is look at the organic traffic that has been lost to AI overviews, LLMs and other emerging search features and determine if that traffic was actually making us money or simply costing us money. It may well be that your website is seeing a reduction in low, or non-converting, top-of-the-funnel traffic and as such, you are actually saving money. This should be calculated and factored into your discussions about SEO spend and ROI.”

Helen Pollitt, Getty Images Director of SEO

The moderate-negative group shows a similar appetite for reinvestment. Forty-five percent plan to increase investment, 40% plan to hold, 4% plan to decrease, and 11% remain unsure. Pressure is leading many teams to defend and rebuild search visibility.

Dependence on organic discovery is a common thread. Many organizations believe adaptation will pay off. Others see few channels that can replace search at the same scale and level of intent, leaving them little room to step back.

How Organizations Are Responding

Budget and Attention Are Moving Toward AI Search

Which activities delivered your strongest SEO results in the past 12 months?

Original content led the activities credited with strong results at 56%. Content refreshes followed at 50%, and 37% selected technical SEO. Authority building was chosen by 28%. GEO appeared among the strongest result drivers for 14%.

How Organizations Are Responding

Which activities are you planning to invest in or prioritize over the next 12 months?

Original content remains the leading planned priority at 52%. GEO rises to 43%, followed by content refreshes at 36% and authority building at 34%. Brand visibility and AI Overview optimization each reach 28%. Technical SEO falls to 24%, while digital PR reaches 19%.

Where GEO Stands

GEO Is Taking a Larger Share of the 2027 Search Plan

GEO shows the largest gap between this year's results and next year's plans. Fourteen percent named optimization for AI answer engines among their strongest result drivers, while 43% plan to prioritize it over the next 12 months. Planned activity is nearly three times the current proof point.

Content refreshes fall from 50% of result selections to 36% of planned priorities. Technical SEO moves from 37% to 24%.

“It's completely normal for people to minimize the number of content refreshes they schedule. Each refresh costs money, time, or both, and traditional evergreen content no longer drives the same number of clicks. But evergreen content still has a foundational role in content strategy and the acquisition and retention of users. It's up to us as SEOs to help identify the content that could still drive value. And don't be afraid to generate your own demand. Lots of evergreen content hasn't even been considered yet – but if you can drive searches for your brand + product/service, you'll a) generate users and b) cement yourself as an authority on the topic in the eyes of people, Google, and AI platforms.”

Harry Clarkson-Bennett, The Telegraph SEO Director

Because budgets and team capacity are finite, GEO's rise will consume resources and senior attention. Content refreshes and technical SEO are the most likely sources because they show the largest declines in next year's priority map.

“Losing focus on technical SEO is, in most cases, an error. The majority of sites – particularly large ones – have had significant tech debt for some time. Rather than focusing on the technical foundations like semantic HTML, JavaScript rendering, heading structure or accessibility, resource is being allocated to something shiny. But indexing, rendering, and crawlability are arguably more important than ever.”

Harry Clarkson-Bennett, The Telegraph SEO Director

GEO depends on the same foundations as traditional search, so the budget should treat GEO as an extension of the search program. Give AI visibility a defined allocation while continuing to fund the technical maintenance, priority content updates and original work that make information discoverable, credible and useful.

“Defunding technical SEO and content refreshes to pay for GEO creates a false tradeoff. Crawlability, freshness, authority, structured information, and original reporting are also the foundations that help AI systems discover, understand, and cite content. GEO should extend strong SEO practices, not replace the workhorses that make visibility possible in the first place.”

John Shehata, NewzDash CEO and Founder

Most Teams Have Started With the Easiest GEO Tactics

If you are actively optimizing for visibility in AI answer engines, which strategies are you employing?

GEO adoption is already widespread. Ninety-four percent selected at least one concrete tactic. Eight percent selected 'no active GEO strategies,' including 2% who also selected a tactic. A conservative reading therefore places active adoption at 92%.

Clear structure leads the list. Sixty-eight percent use headings and lists, often alongside tables or FAQs. Thirty-seven percent create comparison content with trust signals designed to be answer-ready. Thirty-two percent put the most important information early in the article.

The more demanding practices appear less often. Twenty-six percent write with higher entity density. Twenty-two percent use definitive, data-backed language. Twenty-two percent build third-party mentions and citations. Sixteen percent target bottom-funnel answers such as pricing pages and case studies.

“While 94% of programs are embracing generative engine optimization, bottom-funnel answer targeting sits at a surprisingly low 16%. This represents a major strategic blind spot, as high-intent queries are where buying decisions happen.

Capturing these conversions starts with visibility. You must first have a tracking platform that allows you to gain insights into how your audience is searching in AI engines and then who is being cited for these high-intent prompts to pinpoint your content gaps. Without that foundation, you risk severe AI hallucinations. Generative models synthesize answers from across the web. If you don’t actively fill content gaps, AI could rely on outdated reviews or forums. When models surface incorrect pricing or features at the point of purchase, conversions take a direct hit.”

Mary Palumbo, Conductor Sr. AEO/SEO Strategy Director

Let’s talk about those who are seeing success with AI, because there’s something to experiment with here.

Thirteen percent reported a net-positive impact from AI features, offering an early view of success for stronger adoption. Every respondent in that group uses at least one concrete GEO tactic. Half create answer-ready comparison content with trust signals, compared with 37% of the full sample. Entity-dense writing is used by 32% of the group, compared with 26% overall.

Within the AI-forward group, 46% reported meaningful organic improvement, well above the 29% rate for the full sample.

The cohort is small, so the pattern is best used to guide controlled experiments rather than treated as proof of cause and effect.

A useful GEO plan begins with a handful of buyer questions and a clear baseline. Teams can test:

• Answer-ready formats
• Original data
• Expert sourcing
• Comparison content
• Stronger third-party citations

The practices that improve relevant visibility and qualified demand earn more support in the next planning cycle.

How Success Will Be Measured

SEO Attribution Is Ahead of AI Measurement, but Still Incomplete

How confident is your organization in its ability to accurately attribute revenue or pipeline to SEO?

Established SEO attribution is further along than AI measurement, though confidence remains mixed. Even within the long-established world of SEO, only 19% say their attribution is reliable. Forty-four percent use a model with known gaps, and 21% describe attribution as inconsistent or disputed internally. Eleven percent do not attempt revenue attribution, while 5% are working to establish a model.

How confident is your organization in its ability to measure and interpret its AI search visibility?

Only 9% feel very confident measuring and interpreting AI-search visibility. Half have data but gaps in tooling or interpretation. Another 25% track AI visibility without fully trusting the numbers. Nine percent are actively trying to solve the problem, and 7% have not begun tracking.

Among respondents planning to prioritize GEO, 92% lack full measurement confidence. That is almost identical to the 91% rate across the full sample. The market is still learning how to measure AI visibility even as investment grows.

“AI search is still fresh as a channel. Our ability to track visibility will improve over time as the platforms start to provide more useful data and we start to understand how the systems work. Due to hyper-personalization, we won’t know everything about the user experience, but we can get a good understanding of what brands are recommended in distinct categories.”

Darrell Tyler, CallRail Senior Manager, Organic Growth

Money and attention are advancing ahead of perfect measurement. The teams that build useful signals first will know where to increase investment or change course. They will also recognize when an experiment should stop.

“Anyone in organic search has been here before, and measuring success has only become harder. AI visibility can open a Pandora's box of attribution claims right now, and it doesn't help that assistants don't pass referral data the way search engines mostly do. Measure what you can and benchmark safely.”

Alex Moss, Yoast Principal SEO

How Success Will Be Measured

Attribution Confidence Is Closely Tied to Reported Success

Among respondents with very reliable attribution, 52% reported meaningful organic improvement. Only 14% of the low-confidence group said the same.

Two forces probably contribute to the gap. Strong measurement supports better decisions and helps teams protect strategies long enough to see results.

Better-resourced organizations are also more likely to have reliable attribution, which makes it easier to connect a healthy business outcome to search.

The difference in conversion performance was smaller. Conversions held or grew for 68% of the very-confident group and 49% of the low-confidence group. Better measurement may support better decisions, but it also makes successful outcomes easier to recognize and credit to search. Organizational resources probably influence both, so the results show a strong association rather than cause and effect.

Low-confidence teams appear to be seeing more business stability than they are able to credit to search. That creates a familiar budget problem: the channel may be working, yet the team enters planning conversations with a weak case for continued support.

A practical example is easy to picture. Organic traffic falls while demo requests remain steady. Sales continues to receive qualified leads, yet weak source tracking leaves the marketing team unable to show how search contributed. When budgets tighten, leaders may cut a program that cannot demonstrate its value, even when it is still delivering results.

“It’s simple, people that have done the work to understand organic attribution are able to see the full breadth of what it can provide. If there are gaps in your attribution, the performance report you get each month will always be half-baked. You’re leaving money on the table if you're not tracking what’s coming through on your Google Business Profile. The better the attribution, the better vision you have to see organic growth.”

Darrell Tyler, CallRail Senior Manager, Organic Growth

How Success Will Be Measured

Build an AI Search Scorecard People Can Use

AI-search scorecard should connect visibility to business value across four layers: presence in important buyer queries, citation quality, audience response, and commercial contribution. Track referral and direct traffic, branded demand, qualified leads, pipeline influence, and revenue. A composite score can show direction, but leaders should still see the underlying measures, baseline, data source, and confidence level.

Anchor the scorecard to the conversion actions the business values most. Tag visible referrals consistently, ask prospects how they found you, and reconcile marketing and sales numbers monthly.

Maintain a short list of purchase-related questions, based on search data and sales conversations, and regularly check whether the brand appears in AI-generated answers for those queries.

Give every GEO experiment a review date and criteria for further investment. Expand tests that produce relevant visibility, accurate citations, or qualified behavior. Change course when mentions have little relevance or commercial value.

How the Work Is Changing

Most Teams Use AI With Heavy Human Control

How is your organization currently using AI in SEO workflows?

AI is already part of everyday search work. Sixty-six percent use it for research work, including outlines and briefs. Forty-nine percent use AI-generated drafts with heavy human shaping. Twenty-three percent use AI for technical analysis, and 20% publish primarily AI-generated content with light review.

“AI-assisted work is the new way to work and will continue to be for a very long time. For a long time, SEOs had a laundry list of optimizations, tactics, research, checklists, new ideas, and more for just a single piece of content. Producing content of the highest quality would take days if not weeks, without the promise of organic performance. Now those procedures have become automated without having to rely on your own faculties.”

Darrell Tyler, CallRail Senior Manager, Organic Growth

Teams also use AI for technical analysis, competitive research, metadata, editing, fact-checking, reporting, and automation. Nineteen percent use agents or multi-step workflows. Seven percent selected minimal or no AI use.

How the Work Is Changing

Human Judgment Remains the Center of the Workflow

The most common pattern gives machines the repeatable work and people the judgment calls. AI can search, summarize, organize, compare, and produce a first pass. People decide what is true, what is useful, what is distinctive, and what belongs under the brand's name.

Reported SEO performance was stronger among respondents using AI more extensively. Meaningful improvement was reported by 29% of those using AI for research and briefing, matching the full sample. Improvement rose to 31% among those heavily revising AI drafts, 36% among mostly-AI content users, and 39% among those using agents or automation. The pattern suggests that greater AI adoption is associated with better reported performance, although it does not establish that AI caused the improvement.

These groups overlap, and several are small. The pattern still shows that deeper AI use can coexist with strong performance. Automation appears most useful when teams know where it saves time and where human review carries real business value.

Seven percent selected minimal or no AI use, and none reported meaningful organic improvement. Two percent of the full sample also selected a concrete AI use, showing some overlap in the category. The zero-improvement result is directional because the cohort is small.

How the Work Is Changing

The Content Flood Raises the Value of Expertise

What concerns you most about SEO's trajectory over the next 12 months?

Traffic erosion from AI Overviews and zero-click search leads the concern list at 62%. The flood of AI-generated content follows at 54%, while 42% worry about proving return on investment. Signal loss concerns 29%, algorithm volatility concerns 27%, and diminishing content returns concern 23%. Overreliance on Google concerns 20%, internal deprioritization concerns 16%, and 3% are not particularly concerned.

The concern makes sense. The same tools that help good teams work faster also make average content cheaper to produce. Volume rises quickly, but that doesn’t guarantee quality. Original knowledge and useful first-party evidence remain scarce.

Next year's priorities reflect that concern. Authority building rises from 28% of result selections to 34% of planned priorities. Brand visibility and off-site mentions rise from 20% to 28%. Teams are putting more attention into authority and citation-worthiness.

Clear quality controls will matter more as production speeds up. Research needs traceable sources. Important claims need primary evidence. Subject-matter experts need a defined review role. Legal and brand risks need an escalation path. Every published asset needs a person who owns the final decision.

The hiring profile follows from those controls. Strong teams need people who can connect audience needs with subject expertise, search mechanics, and commercial goals. Prompting is only one part of that job. Greater value comes from business judgment and accountability for the result.

Editorial judgment deserves particular weight. It is the ability to know good content from bad, to identify worthwhile ideas for the audience, test whether evidence supports a claim, recognize what a draft is missing, and shape the work for a specific audience.

Skilled editors turn those decisions into repeatable quality, with results that can be demonstrated through engagement, qualified traffic, conversions, citations, or audience retention. That combination of judgment and proven performance may be one of the hardest capabilities to find when hiring.

Editorial judgment is like a sense of humor: everyone thinks they have it, but few people do.

What Teams Need Next

Experienced Practitioners Are Taking AI Search Seriously

What do you most want to learn or get better at this year?

AI search optimization leads the learning agenda at 74%. Using AI tools to scale SEO and content follows at 54%. Better analytics, measurement, and ROI ranks third at 33%. Link building and digital PR comes next at 25%.

Interest in AI-search learning was high across most experience levels, with one clear exception. Only 50% of practitioners with one to three years of experience selected AI-search learning, compared with 71% to 84% in every other experience group.

The under-one-year cohort represents only about 4% of the sample, so its 71% result should be treated cautiously.

Interest was highest among established practitioners: 84% of those with more than 10 years of experience and 83% of the four-to-six-year group selected AI-search learning. People who have worked through earlier search shifts are treating this one with urgency.

“As someone with over a decade in SEO, seeing 84% of veterans eager to master AI search optimization makes total sense. Most of us were drawn to this field because we are naturally curious problem-solvers who love understanding consumer intent. We stayed because the industry never gets stale. While past updates were mostly about Google changing its rules, this transformation is fundamentally a massive shift in consumer behavior itself. That makes it single-handedly the most exciting change of our careers.

Newer SEOs are often still mastering foundational mechanics, but veterans recognize this shift as an unprecedented evolution in how people search. For those who thrive on change, AI search is why we fell in love with SEO.”

Mary Palumbo, Conductor Sr. AEO/SEO Strategy Director

The one-to-three-year cohort is the real outlier at 50%, at least 21 percentage points below every other group. Experience does not produce a simple upward trend; the survey instead reveals a specific gap within this early-career cohort. Different role demands or learning priorities may explain it.

What Leaders Should Do

Four Patterns Show How Organizations Are Responding

Conversions held up better than traffic for 39% of respondents.

This group saw traffic fall or remain flat while leads and conversions held or improved. Among the 25% whose traffic declined while conversions remained resilient, 61% plan to prioritize GEO. Their immediate task is to identify what continues to produce value and explain it in business terms.

Positive results from AI features were associated with active GEO programs.

Thirteen percent reported a net-positive impact from AI search features, and everyone in that group uses at least one GEO tactic. Half create comparison content with trust signals, while 32% use entity-dense writing. Meaningful organic improvement was reported by 46% of this group, compared with 29% of the full sample.

Agencies are preparing to spend more.

Agency owners and independent consultants account for 17% of respondents. Within that group, 72% expect SEO investment to increase, compared with 42% overall. Client demand may be contributing to their more aggressive plans.

Reliable attribution makes successful performance easier to recognize.

Among the 19% with reliable revenue attribution, 52% reported meaningful SEO improvement. They also had stronger conversion results than respondents with low attribution confidence, although the difference in actual outcomes was smaller than the difference in reported success.

What Leaders Should Do

What to Stop, Measure, and Fund in Search

Complete attribution and shared standards for AI visibility are still developing. Teams are going to have to learn to evaluate progress with incomplete data until the attribution problem gets solved. Protect the work already producing value while pushing new horizons with controlled experiments. Search in 2027 requires disciplined investment under imperfect conditions.

Methodology

About the Survey

The analysis uses 166 valid responses collected in June 2026 from Search Engine Journal's audience. The survey contained 13 numbered questions, with Question 4 split into two parts. Percentages are rounded to the nearest whole number, so displayed totals may differ slightly from 100%. Multi-select questions can exceed 100% because respondents could choose more than one answer.

Cross-tabulations are descriptive. The text identifies small cohorts and uses them as directional evidence.

Who Responded

How many years of hands-on SEO experience do you have?

The respondent base is experienced. Thirty-three percent have more than 10 years of hands-on SEO experience, and 25% have seven to 10 years. Another 21% have four to six years, 17% have one to three years, and 4% have less than one year.

Which best describes your current role?

The largest role group is team leads and managers at 25%. Senior individual contributors account for 19%, directors for 14%, and agency owners for 13%. Mid-level contributors make up 11%. The remaining respondents are vice presidents or executives at 6%, consultants at 4%, C-suite leaders at 4%, and entry-level practitioners at 3%.

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