Branch’s new enterprise benchmark data suggests AI-driven discovery is no longer a side quest: 26% of companies say AI search delivered more than half their site traffic in 2025, and 49% expect to cross that threshold by late 2026. AI search’s share of traffic is rising faster than traditional search (up from 35% to 50%), yet leaders still think classic SEO will grow too—projecting an 8-point lift from roughly 45% to 53% by year-end. Translation: marketers are now managing a two-engine search world, and the dashboard lights are all blinking at once.
Here’s the tension: behavior is changing faster than the measurement. Christine Park, Branch’s chief transformation officer, summed it up: “We’re so early and still defining problems as we try to solve them.” The survey finds nearly 80% of businesses struggle with basic measurement of AI search impact, even as only 3% report negative effects and 65% are already putting more than a quarter of budget behind it. And while 87% expect AI platforms to close sales this year, only 41% are partnering directly with those platforms (and just 25% are using external vendors for AI-powered search), leaving a lot of “we think it worked” energy in the room.
Budgets are following the work: 81% say they’re already optimizing for AI search, with another 17% planning to start within 12 months. Spend is clustering around fundamentals—62% toward crawlability, 60% toward tracking/measurement of AI-driven traffic, and 58% each toward LLM-friendly content formats and keeping content updated for AI summaries. Performance-wise, 89% report AI search improved marketing results in 2025; 35% saw gains of 10%+ and 54% saw improvements under 10%. Park’s blunt reminder is the real takeaway: “AI isn’t a tooling shift, it’s a human one,” and the org chart may need as much updating as the content calendar.
Read more at MediaPost.