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Marketers have long viewed brand search as a practical indicator of brand demand. This hypothesis seems less and less reliable.
Research measures intent. The brand influences the destination of this intention. The relationship is consistent enough that brand search is a reliable indicator of brand demand.
Our data reinforces this relationship. Across our entire customer portfolio, branded customer acquisition costs are, on average, 76.6% lower than non-branded customer acquisition costs. But our data also reveals a more consistent trend. Over the past month, brand search demand has decreased by 11.1%, despite a relatively unchanged auction environment.
If brand search remains a reliable indicator of brand demand, the implication is simple: demand itself must weaken. The evidence suggests otherwise.
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When the proxy stops reflecting reality
To understand why, it helps to eliminate the most obvious alternative explanations.
- The first possibility is that consumers enter the market with weaker brand preferences. Based on normalized data from Google Keyword Planner and Semrush, the evidence does not support this conclusion.
- The second possibility is the decline in engagement with search results. Rand Fishkin’s research suggests users click less frequently in searches. However, it’s worth noting that navigation searches, as ranked by SEMrush, have not seen a significant drop in reported click-through rates.
- The third possibility is macroeconomic pressure. If deteriorating economic conditions suppressed demand, we would expect a corresponding decline in overall search volume. The available data does not indicate this.
After considering these explanations, a different conclusion becomes more plausible. Consumers do not necessarily express less demand. They express the request differently.
AI-based research offers a more compelling explanation. Less than 12 months ago, AI insights appeared in 57.2% of commercial searches for a primary keyword query for one of our clients. By June 2026, this figure had increased to 95.9%.
While AI systems answer questions, compare alternatives, and synthesize information before users perform additional searches, branded search captures a smaller part of the decision-making process. The observable metric changes even if the underlying preference does not change.
This is essentially a measurement problem rather than a demand problem.
Why it changes marketing decisions
This distinction is important because organizations allocate their capital based on the metrics they trust. This dynamic also helps explain why performance marketing represents such a disproportionate share of marketing investments.
When a metric appears to draw a direct line from spending to measurable results, capital naturally follows. If this measure is a less reliable representation of the underlying objective, capital allocation may be distorted.
If brand search underrepresents brand demand, marketers risk concluding that their brands are weakening when in reality, consumer behavior has simply shifted upstream. The consequence is predictable: underinvestment in activities that create long-term preference.
Research always measures expressed intent. What has changed is that the expressed intention is no longer synonymous with the underlying request. AI has inserted an additional layer between consumer preferences and observable search behavior. Searching by brand remains useful, but it should no longer be considered definitive.
The involvement extends beyond research. Whenever a long-standing proxy becomes less representative of the phenomenon it was intended to measure, organizations risk optimizing for the proxy rather than the objective itself. Marketing is unlikely to be an exception.
Rethinking how brand demand is measured
If brand search becomes a less reliable measure of brand demand, that doesn’t mean abandoning this measure. It is about reconsidering the framework in which it is interpreted.
Brand search should remain an indicator of brand demand, but no longer its definitive proxy. More emphasis should be placed on metrics that more directly capture preferences, including spontaneous awareness, contextualized search share, and brand conversion rate.
If preference precedes measurable intent, investments in distinctive positioning, original research, thought leadership, and sustainable brand building should no longer be seen as adjacent to performance. It is the activities that determine it.
Changing the allocation of capital also changes where competitive advantage is built. As AI becomes an intermediary between consumers and information, authority extends beyond the channels a brand directly controls.
Competitive advantage may depend less on producing more content than on integrating it into the trusted set of data that AI systems constantly reference. Increasingly, visibility comes through credibility rather than distribution.
Research will likely continue to measure intent. Brand search, however, appears to capture a narrower expression of brand demand than before. Organizations that recognize this shift early cannot simply measure their brand performance more accurately. They can allocate capital more efficiently because they understand the distinction between the measure and the underlying demand it seeks to represent.
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