You can’t get away from AI in the news, but getting credible information on how the marketing ecosystem is actually changing is tough. To help, Branch surveyed 300 enterprise senior marketing executives to learn how they see, and are acting, on the shifting marketing landscape. It’s changing faster than you think, and the impact is good. Mostly.

Leaders see AI search as another channel, not a replacement

Marketers are, understandably, an optimistic bunch. So it’s not surprising respondents in the AI Search and Discovery: Enterprise Benchmark Report are largely confident in the methods and potential impacts to their business. But what’s immediately striking about the report is that the sentiment goes beyond confidence; it shows empirical evidence that a large majority of companies are not only seeing positive results but also taking drastic action.

Initially, it seemed AI would negatively affect traditional search, cause the destruction of funnels, and complete the upheaval of traditional marketing. The reality, as history tends to be, is a bit more subtle. Those surveyed seem to be viewing AI as a new channel, not an upending paradigm. And interestingly, the future and past seem to be working together to boost digital influence. In the last year, marketing leaders have collectively seen traditional SEO increase website traffic share by 8% and AI search traffic by 15%. This isn’t an isolated instance: A staggering 89% of respondents saw an overall improvement in marketing performance from AI search. AI, then, is working with SEO to increase digital footprints.

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The budgets are moving as fast as the technology

Seeing an overwhelmingly positive impact, it’s no surprise marketers will be quick to adjust budgets, but the scale of dollars is hard to comprehend. In record time, AI search has reached a massive number of users — ChatGPT alone crossed 400 million weekly active users earlier this year — so it’s natural that marketers will begin to shift budgets to reach the users in a new, growing channel. But it’s not natural at this scale: 65% of respondents are dedicating at least a quarter of their marketing budget to AI search in 2026. Of these, 28% are allocating over half. Today’s financial news is awash with the mind-bending capital expenditure budgets by large tech companies on AI infrastructure, but this is new information in the marketing world. Some estimates show the global digital advertising market reaching upwards of $100 billion this year. Extrapolating these results, marketers are planning to apply a minimum of $16B on AI search this year.

But that’s not the most stunning proof of how fast the market is moving. Traditionally, enterprises move notoriously slowly: the average buying cycle for a business is over 11 months, according to a 6sense study. Scott Brinker puts it best in his chiefmartec publication: “Technology changes exponentially. Organizations change logarithmically.” There’s no doubt AI technology is moving quickly. So quickly, in fact, AI’s role to humanity undergoes a vicious whipsaw among popular sentiment. OpenAI demonstrates an almost manic weekly on-again, off-again product launch roadmap. So you’d think most marketers would be taking a measured, slow approach to how their business would interact with such a volatile market. You’d be wrong.

87% of the senior leaders across a variety of industries think their company will be selling via AI this year. An AI-shopping product doesn’t even exist today, but these leaders still expect their large organization to be on board and functioning before the end of Q4. That expectation requires not just the technology creation and adoption but internal alignment, budget reallocation, vendor evaluation, and change management. Adoption this year would require incredible speed, given these wheels of organizational machinery historically take years to move.

Even the optimists harbor doubt

That’s not to say the sentiment is all good. Surprisingly, when given the chance to openly articulate the opportunities of AI, 60% of respondents chose instead to express concern. Some of these concerns could be classified as teething problems (data privacy, accuracy, and workforce impact), but more than a few reflect real existential concerns about whether the economics of AI actually pencil out long-term. The anxiety surfaces most clearly in respondents’ own words. “We are investing in what we believe to be the best, but we lack long-term data and experience to guide us,” shared one VP of marketing in health and wellness. Another was more blunt: “Will everything maintain without turning into a disaster? Can we really count on this data to drive cost-focused initiatives?” Even amidst the bullish bets these executives are making, there is an undercurrent of pessimism, even fear. That tension isn’t new. Five hundred years ago Machiavelli pointed this out: “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.” Hype aside, AI is changing marketing, and it’s hard to grasp just how fast.

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