5 AI Search Trends for 2026 | Louise Linehan (Ahrefs)

Tim Soulo (0:00)

We have prepared five hot marketing trends for you that the industry is talking about.

Louise Linehan (0:05)

The CEO Cloudflare recently shared, half of the traffic on the internet is now an AI bot or crawler or an agent. We did some research into click loss and AI overviews. According to our estimates, have caused 58% drop in clicks. Impressions that are either flat or growing, but clicks that are nosediving. It's AI overviews absorbing your clicks. A post that is driving discussion around AI ROI was a post that Will Reynolds put up. He optimized a page and managed to get a 1900% rise in AI citations. But when he actually looked into the value, traffic grew only 2x. GEO advice is just SEO that we've been doing forever anyway. How AI retrieves content, AI tracking, AI sentiment, they are new responsibilities for marketers.

Tim Soulo (0:59)

This is data back. This is not our opinion. This is not the opinion of my guest Louise, who works at Ahrefs. This is what people are actually talking about, and this is what people are searching for. And Louise is the one who prepared the amazing presentation with the five trends. And that's what we're going to discuss. Louise, welcome to Ahrefs Podcast.

Louise Linehan (1:16)

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Tim Soulo (1:19)

So first, I think you wanted to give people some background of how these trends were collected, right?

Louise Linehan (1:26)

Yeah, so I, like you just said, I'm going to be talking about five AI search trends that marketers are actually talking about.

And that's based on an article I wrote on the blog, which you can see down here. And I've also tried to include a few bonus trends. So if we have time at the end, I'll go through those as well. First of all, I just thought this was quite cool data, and I just wanted to add it in as a bit of context. And I'm sure everyone is well aware that AI search is kind of a big deal right now, but I thought this just kind of put it into context. So 28,000 searches happen for AI search every month, and for search engine optimization, that number is 73,000. So already AI search is like two-fifths of the demand of the overarching topic of SEO.

Tim Soulo (2:14)

I'm super glad to see that, because whenever I talk about like answer engine optimization and everything, I prefer the term AI search. Like it's so succinct. And the other day, I was on some other podcast, and they asked me like, what do you prefer, AEO or GEO? And I said, I honestly prefer AI search. So now seeing that it is becoming a popular term, it's very cool to see for me personally. But yeah, please continue.

Louise Linehan (2:42)

Yeah, I think it does what it says on the Tim, which is why I like it as well. And it has grown according to our Keyword Explorer data, 350% over the last two years. So yeah.

Tim Soulo (2:55)

Do you have an article about the AI search that ranks at the top?

Louise Linehan (2:59)

I don't know yet. I'm hoping that this might rank a bit higher soon as well. So things crossed. And yeah, just a bit of recent news. OpenAI recently announced just last month that Chat GPT now has a billion users per week, which is obviously not nowhere near as much as Google. But yeah, it's just kind of signals that they are still growing. This is what I counted as a trend when I was coming up. And these are curated trends. I'm not saying like these are the top trends ever, but I looked at social media and search data. So I wanted to focus on live industry discussion based on LinkedIn and Reddit posts. And then I wanted to look at that alongside rising search demand. And I essentially wanted to look at social media because I think that's where most trends are sort of born, and that's where you like discover them. And then I wanted to use search because the data, the search demand like validates the trend.

And I also think by the time it's reached search, a topic is usually bedded in as a industry idea or concept. I used Scrapbook, which is a tool that you can see here, that I built with Let AI Do, which is for anyone watching our AI marketing platform.

I save all of my LinkedIn and Reddit posts in Scrapbook, and every week it automatically generates a report and tells me what the common themes and topics are being discussed at the moment. So I asked Let AI...