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The Insight Journal Business & Operations

Marketing Strategy · Pillar

Marketing strategy, with the numbers the guides leave out

A marketing strategy is the set of decisions about customer, offer, position and channel that a marketing plan then executes. US companies funded that work with 9.6% of overall budget and 9.0% of revenue in 2026, and put 56.4% of growth spending into selling more of what they already sell to the customers they already have. This page carries the definition, the frameworks, and the allocation data the ranking guides do not.

Reviewed August 2026 · The Insight Journal Editorial Team

In short

A marketing strategy is the long-term set of decisions about which customers a company serves, what value it offers them, how it positions that offer against alternatives, and through which channels it reaches them. It is distinct from a marketing plan, which is the shorter-term schedule of campaigns and tactics that executes those decisions (Coursera, 2026).
A marketing strategy taking shape: a planning wall of pinned blank cards and coloured string in an empty meeting room.

The distinction

Strategy and plan are not the same document

In short

A marketing strategy is a set of decisions. A marketing plan is a schedule. The strategy names the customer, the offer, the position and the channels; the plan names the campaigns, the owners and the dates that deliver them. Coursera draws the same line, describing strategy as the big picture and the plan as the concrete actions.

The distinction matters because the two documents fail differently. A weak plan wastes a quarter. A weak strategy wastes every quarter that follows it, because each campaign inherits the same unmade decision.

There is a practical test. Hand the document to someone who has never worked on the account and ask them to brief an agency from it.

If they can say who the customer is and why that customer should choose you, it is a strategy. If all they can extract is a list of things to post, it is a plan wearing the wrong title.

The four decisions underneath every framework

Published frameworks vary in length and vocabulary. Underneath the variation, the same four decisions keep reappearing, and holding them makes every framework you meet navigable.

Segmentation, targeting and positioning is mostly the first and third. The marketing mix is mostly the second and fourth. A SWOT analysis is a way of pressure-testing all four against the outside world.

A question worth refusing

Why nobody agrees on how many marketing strategies there are

In short

There is no standard count, and the search results prove it. Google's People Also Ask box on this term asks for the four main, the five main, six, and seven, all on the same page. Each number is a teaching convention from a different publisher. The frameworks that genuinely are standardized (the marketing mix, segmentation-targeting-positioning, SWOT, SMART and the Ansoff matrix) do not agree on a total either.

Enumerating a discipline is a way to teach it. Different courses slice the same material differently, and the number that survives into a blog headline is usually the number that fitted the lesson plan.

That is not a scandal. It becomes one only when a reader memorizes a list of seven and walks into a planning meeting expecting the room to recognize it.

The more useful move is to work out which framework the number is pointing at, then use the framework. The table does that translation.

One correction worth making early: several of these are not strategies at all. The marketing mix is an execution checklist, and the 5 Cs are an environmental scan. Neither one decides anything on its own.

What each numbered list of marketing strategies is usually pointing at
The count What it usually means What it actually does
Four The 4 Ps, or the four Ansoff quadrants Execution checklist, or a growth question
Five The 5 Cs of marketing: company, customers, competitors, collaborators, climate Environmental scan before deciding
Six A publisher-specific list of channels Tactics presented as strategy
Seven The AMA's seven-step development process A sequence of work, not a set of options
Ten or twelve Listicle counts from education blogs Channel inventory, no decision logic

The toolkit

The frameworks that survive contact with a budget

Five named frameworks carry almost all of the working load on this topic. Each answers a different question, and reaching for the wrong one is how a planning session produces a document nobody can act on. Note that none of them is one of the types of marketing strategies a listicle promises; they are ways of deciding.

In short

A framework is not a strategy. It is a structured way of arriving at one. Segmentation-targeting-positioning decides who and where you stand, the marketing mix decides how you execute, SWOT tests the ground, SMART tests the objective, and the Ansoff matrix decides where growth is supposed to come from.

Segmentation, targeting, positioning

Often shortened to STP. Segmentation targeting positioning splits the market, chooses the segment, then claims a brand positioning inside it. Customer segmentation and an ideal customer profile belong here, ahead of any channel choice.

The marketing mix, or 4 Ps

The four Ps of marketing are product, price, place and promotion. That product price place promotion checklist describes execution, which is why it sits closer to the plan than to the strategy despite appearing in every definition of the latter.

SWOT analysis

Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Paired with a competitive analysis it is a decent pressure test on a position you have already drafted, and close to useless as a way of generating one from a blank page.

SMART objectives

SMART goals are specific measurable achievable relevant time-bound. The American Marketing Association makes them step two of its seven-step process, immediately after market research and ahead of buyer personas.

The Ansoff matrix

The Ansoff growth matrix sets four boxes defined by whether the product and the market are existing or new. It is the only growth matrix here that a national survey measures real spending against, which is the next section.

The published process

The American Marketing Association's seven-step process runs market research, SMART objectives, audience and personas, value proposition, marketing mix, action plan, then measurement. It is the closest thing the field has to an agreed sequence.

The measured framework

The Ansoff matrix, and what companies actually fund inside it

Every guide on this topic draws the four boxes. None of them says how much money goes into each one. That figure exists, and it changes how the framework reads.

In short

US companies put 56.4% of growth spending into market penetration, 22.9% into product and service development, 14.1% into market development and 6.5% into diversification over the prior 12 months, according to The CMO Survey's 2026 edition. Selling more of what you already have to the customers you already serve is not the conservative option. It is the mainstream one.
Existing markets New markets Existing products New products Market penetration 56.4% Product development 22.9% Market development 14.1% Diversification 6.5%
Share of growth spending allocated to each Ansoff quadrant over the prior 12 months. Source: The CMO Survey, 35th edition, fielded January 2026, n=308 US marketing leaders. Box heights are drawn to reflect the allocation, not the risk.
  1. 56.4%

    Market penetration

    Existing products and services into existing markets. Prior reading: 57.4% in 2024.

    A market penetration strategy is the default, and by a wide margin. Companies over-indexing here cite core strengths and resource constraints as the reason.

  2. 22.9%

    Product development

    New products and services into existing markets. Prior reading: 19.2% in 2024.

    The only quadrant gaining ground. Companies leaning into it name AI and digital innovation as the opportunity.

  3. 14.1%

    Market development

    Existing products and services into new markets. Prior reading: 17.0% in 2024.

    Falling. Western Europe is the most cited new international opportunity at 22%, followed by China at 11%.

  4. 6.5%

    Diversification

    New products and services into new markets. Prior reading: 6.4% in 2024.

    Flat and small. A diversification strategy stays a rounding error in most budgets, which is worth knowing before you propose one.

What the shift since 2024 tells you

Only one quadrant is gaining. Product and service development rose from 19.2% of growth spending in 2024 to 22.9% in 2026, while market development fell from 17.0% to 14.1%.

Companies are deepening rather than expanding. The stated rationale splits cleanly: firms leaning into new offerings name AI and digital innovation as the opportunity, while firms concentrating on penetration cite core strengths and resource constraints.

That pattern is worth reading alongside what breaks when growth outruns the operation, because the inward turn is often a capacity decision dressed as a marketing one.

Reading your own split against it

Take last year's marketing and growth spending and sort every line into one of the four boxes. The exercise takes an afternoon and usually produces one surprise.

The benchmark is not a target. A company sitting at 80% penetration is not automatically wrong, but it should be able to say why, and a company claiming a growth strategy while funding 6% of it outside the first box has a document that does not match its bank statement.

The wider question of which box to fund next is the subject of growth strategies that assume the operations can carry them.

The benchmark

What a marketing strategy actually costs to run

This is the question every guide on the term invites and none of them answers. Here is the number, with the spread that makes it usable.

In short

Marketing accounted for 9.6% of overall company budgets and 9.0% of company revenues in 2026, the lowest budget share since 2021. Total marketing spending grew just 1.7% over the prior 12 months, the weakest growth since 2021, while digital marketing spending grew 8.2%. The budget is not expanding; it is reallocating.

9.6%

Share of overall company budget held by marketing, the lowest reading since 2021

The CMO Survey, 2026

9.0%

Share of company revenues spent on marketing across the same sample

The CMO Survey, 2026

+1.7%

Growth in overall marketing spending over the prior 12 months, the weakest since 2021

The CMO Survey, 2026

+8.2%

Growth in digital marketing spending over the same 12 months

The CMO Survey, 2026

The benchmark moves with who you sell to

A single average is the fastest way to misread this data. The spread across economic sectors is nearly two to one, and it runs in a direction most operators can predict once they see it.

Marketing spend as a share of overall budget and of revenue, by economic sector, 2026
Sector Share of company budget Share of revenue
B2B product 7.0% 7.0%
B2B services 9.2% 10.1%
B2C product 13.8% 12.0%
B2C services 11.5% 7.2%
All respondents 9.6% 9.0%

Size runs the other way from intuition. Companies under $10 million in revenue reported the highest share of revenue going to marketing at 13.7%, while the largest reported some of the lowest. Small companies carry more of the fixed cost of being visible, which is the practical case for marketing moves that do not need a department.

Online sales pull the number up hard. Companies selling 100% online reported 19.6% of budget and 18.8% of revenue going to marketing, against 7.9% and 8.0% for companies with no online sales. If distribution is digital, marketing is not a support function; it is the storefront.

The political reality

Marketing is the first line cut when profit misses

In short

When profits come in below expectation, 53.1% of companies focus on cutting expenses rather than growing revenue, up from 46.0% a year earlier. Marketing is cut ahead of other categories 45.4% of the time. Every strategy written this year is being written against that background whether or not the document mentions it.

Exposure rises with size

At companies with more than 10,000 employees, executives cut marketing over other areas 61.0% of the time. Under 50 employees, the figure is 35.4%. Distance from the customer appears to make the line easier to cut.

And with revenue

Companies above $10 billion in revenue reported 57.7%, against 32.4% for companies under $10 million. Consumer packaged goods was the most exposed industry at 53.4%; real estate the least at 17.5%.

What it means for the document

A strategy that cannot show its contribution in the period it is being questioned is a strategy that gets shortened. That makes measurement a survival requirement rather than a reporting chore, and it connects directly to what the cash position does to a marketing budget.

The diagnosis

The contradiction sitting in most marketing budgets

This is the single finding on this page a reader can act on before lunch. It takes one query against your own spend and one against your own performance.

In short

Acquisition budgets ran 26.0% larger than retention budgets in 2026, up from 19.6% a year earlier, and 82.0% of companies spend more on winning customers than on keeping them. Over the same period retention performance grew 12.8% while acquisition performance grew 7.4%. Money is moving toward the weaker-performing half of the job.

26.0%

How much larger acquisition budgets are than retention budgets, up from 19.6% a year earlier

The CMO Survey, 2026

82.0%

Share of companies that spend more on acquiring customers than on keeping them

The CMO Survey, 2026

+12.8%

Customer retention performance over the prior 12 months, the strongest metric in the set

The CMO Survey, 2026

+7.4%

Customer acquisition performance over the same period, well behind retention

The CMO Survey, 2026

Where the money goes Acquisition budget +26.0% Retention budget Where the performance is Acquisition growth +7.4% Retention growth +12.8%
The two halves of the picture point in opposite directions. Source: The CMO Survey, 35th edition, 2026. Bars are drawn to relative scale within each pair.

Why the gap persists

Acquisition is easier to attribute. A new customer arrives through a traceable path, and somebody can point at the campaign that produced them.

Retention gains surface slowly and get credited to product, to support, or to nothing at all. The median duration of marketing's impact on customers is six months, and that duration has lengthened since 2022.

A measurement window shorter than the effect it is measuring will always favour the fast half. Fixing that is a negotiation with finance before it is an analytics problem, which makes it partly a leadership question: stakeholder alignment now ranks first for 22.3% of marketers as a driver of organic revenue growth, up from 14.9% in 2023. Alignment is a leadership problem before it is a marketing one.

Running the check on your own numbers

  1. 1. Split last year's marketing spend into acquisition and retention. Ambiguous lines go to acquisition, which is the conservative direction for this test.
  2. 2. Pull the growth rate of new customer count and the growth rate of retained revenue over the same period.
  3. 3. If the spending ratio and the performance ratio point opposite ways, you have found the same contradiction the national data shows.
  4. 4. Move a defined, reversible share of budget and measure over two quarters, not one.

The gap is widest where distribution is fully digital. Companies selling 100% online reported acquisition budgets 46.7% larger than retention budgets, roughly twice the gap of every other category.

Channel mix

Where the channel money actually goes

Every ranking guide tells you to choose your channels. None of them says what a normal split looks like or how reliable the forecasts are.

In short

Social media took 14.3% of marketing budgets in 2026, with marketers projecting 17.1% within a year and 23.1% within five. Traditional advertising is projected to decline a further 1.5%. The direction is reliable; the size of the step is not, because 12-month social projections have overshot actual spending by an average of 2.1 percentage points since 2009.
Channel and partner figures from The CMO Survey, 2026
Measure 2026 reading What it tells you
Social media share of budget 14.3% Recovered after a dip; highest in consumer services at 26.7%, lowest in energy at 6.0%
Projected social share in five years 23.1% Treat as a direction, not a plan input, given the historical overshoot
Traditional advertising Projected to fall 1.5% A multi-year trend rather than a single-year swing
Companies using channel partners 69.5% Up from 66.5%, still below the roughly 74% seen before the pandemic
Companies that added channels in three years 57.6% Only 6.7% reduced their channel count; the mix is widening, not rotating
Retail media adoption 23.6% A newer line item that most strategy templates have not caught up with

Digital channel openings (47.9%) and social selling (38.8%) are the most common additions, but 30.3% of companies also opened new face-to-face channels. Physical and digital expansion are happening in parallel, not as substitutes, which undercuts the tidy narrative most channel advice is built on.

Choosing between those channels is a separate piece of work from deciding the strategy, and doing it in the wrong order is the most common way a plan gets written before anyone has decided who it is for. That sequence is the subject of turning the strategy into a channel-by-channel plan.

The current shift

AI has moved from the trends section into the budget

Search results on this topic are full of AI trend paragraphs carrying no figures. These are the figures.

In short

AI use rose from 13.1% of marketing activities in 2024 to 24.2% in 2026, with generative AI growing 220% over the same window. Companies project AI will account for 55.9% of marketing activities within three years. Content creation leads adoption at 73.9%, followed by content personalization at 65.4%.

24.2%

Share of marketing activities using AI in 2026, up from 13.1% in 2024

The CMO Survey, 2026

+220%

Growth in generative AI use since 2024, from 7.0% of activities to 22.4%

The CMO Survey, 2026

41.5%

Companies already practising generative engine optimization, a category that did not exist in earlier editions

The CMO Survey, 2026

55.9%

Share of marketing activities companies project AI will handle within three years

The CMO Survey, 2026

Adoption is running ahead of capability

No marketing technology activity in the survey scores above 5 on a 7-point performance scale, and those scores have not improved in two years. Sophistication rose; execution did not.

Marketers named four barriers: lack of budget (20.1%), technology integration and data architecture (19.1%), bandwidth and focus (14.1%), and talent management (13.1%). Hiring at 3.7 and training at 3.9 are the lowest scores anywhere in the set.

Tool selection is not the constraint. Choosing well still helps, and a neutral map of business software by function is the starting point, but the reported bottleneck is people and plumbing.

What AI is reported to have changed

Self-reported outcomes improved year over year: sales productivity up 14.1%, customer satisfaction up 10.8%, and marketing overhead costs down 14.6%.

Those are respondent estimates rather than audited results, and they should be read as such. They are still the only figures of their kind on this topic that carry a named publisher, a sample and a date.

The line most likely to matter to a strategy document this year is generative engine optimization. At 41.5% adoption for a category that did not exist in earlier editions, it has gone from novelty to majority-adjacent in a single cycle.

Measurement

The measurement problem, stated in numbers

"Monitor and measure performance" is step seven of the AMA's process and the last line of almost every guide on this term. Nobody says how hard it is. The survey does.

In short

Marketing leaders rated their ability to generate ROI from marketing technologies at 4.5 on a 7-point scale, and their ability to demonstrate that ROI at 4.2. The gap between those two numbers is the attribution problem in miniature: the return is being produced faster than it can be evidenced.
A marketing measurement set, what each metric measures, and what it exposes
Metric What it measures What it exposes
Customer acquisition cost Fully loaded cost to win one new customer Whether growth is getting cheaper or just louder
Retention rate and retained revenue Share of customers and revenue held period to period The half of performance that the budget currently underfunds
Payback window Time for a customer to repay their acquisition cost Whether the strategy is compatible with the cash position
Channel contribution Revenue attributable to each channel after cost Which channels are carried by the others
Brand value movement Change in brand strength over the period The slow effect a quarterly view will miss; grew 10.0% in 2026
Marketing share of revenue Marketing spend as a percentage of revenue Whether resourcing is defensible against a 9.0% benchmark

Agree the measurement window before the campaign runs, not after the result arrives. With a median effect duration of six months against a quarterly reporting cycle, the window is usually where the argument is actually lost. Most of this data lives in the same systems as the pipeline, which is why the CRM tools this measurement usually lives in matter more than the dashboard on top of them.

Pair a fast metric with a slow one and report both every period. Any single measure run alone eventually gets optimized against, and acquisition cost read without retention is the specific version of that failure this page has already documented in the national numbers.

The unserved half

Where a B2B strategy stops resembling the guides

In short

B2B product companies spent 7.0% of overall budget on marketing in 2026 against 13.8% for B2C product companies, roughly half. The head term is a 94.7% informational query answered by education blogs, while "b2b marketing strategy" reads as 91.8% commercial. The two audiences arrive at the same words wanting different things.

The buyer is a committee

Positioning that persuades a user still has to survive a finance reviewer and a security reviewer. A strategy written for one persona quietly assumes a buying process that does not exist in B2B.

Sales is in the room

B2B marketing hands work to a sales function rather than to a checkout. That handoff is where most of the measurement argument happens, and no ranking page on the head term addresses it.

Where to read on

Our companion guide covers a B2B marketing strategy built around buying committees, including sales alignment, account-based approaches and pipeline as the unit of measurement.

The gap in the search results is real and worth naming. Across the live top ten for this term on 18 August 2026, the field was university blogs, an encyclopedia entry, two vendor pages, a careers site and an Australian state government page. No B2B trade publication ranked at all.

The next query

What people search for straight after this

Google's related searches on this term are a clean map of what the definition leaves unfinished. Eight of them appeared on 18 August 2026, and each one is a different way of asking for something usable.

In short

The related searches ask for a marketing strategy template, marketing strategy examples, a marketing strategy framework, marketing strategy steps, a marketing strategy PDF, a marketing strategy book, a marketing strategy course, and marketing strategy AI. Read together, they say the definition is easy to find and the working artifact is not.
Google related searches for marketing strategy and what each one is really asking for
Related search (after "marketing strategy") What the searcher wants Where it actually leads
Template A document skeleton to fill in The SBA's free business guide covers the same seven headings without a signup
Examples To see one that exists rather than one described Most published examples are brand stories with the numbers removed
Framework A structure to think inside The five named frameworks above, chosen by which question you are stuck on
Steps A marketing strategy process, in order The AMA's seven steps are the closest thing to an agreed sequence
PDF Something portable to circulate internally Usually a course prospectus; the survey report itself is the more useful download
Book Depth beyond a blog post A reasonable instinct, and the one query here a web page should not try to satisfy
AI Whether the toolkit has changed It has: 24.2% of marketing activities now use AI, up from 13.1% in 2024
Course Structured teaching and a credential The reason education blogs dominate these results in the first place

There is a pattern worth naming. Six of the eight are requests for an artifact, not for a marketing strategy definition, which suggests the searcher has already read three or four explanations of what the term means and wants to stop reading and start writing.

If that is you, the shortest honest route is this: use the AMA's sequence to develop a marketing strategy, use the four decisions above to check it is a strategy rather than a plan, then sort your spending into the four Ansoff quadrants and compare it to the benchmark. That last step is the one no template asks you to do.

Method

How we researched this page

One primary dataset, named

Every quantitative figure above comes from The CMO Survey's Highlights and Insights Report, 35th edition, fielded 7 to 29 January 2026 with 308 responses from US for-profit marketing leaders, 97% of them VP-level or above. It is sponsored by Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, Deloitte and the American Marketing Association. Relying on one publisher is a concentration risk, so we are naming it rather than spreading the same numbers across secondary citations to look broader.

What we treat carefully

That sample skews toward larger companies, so sector and size breakouts are printed alongside the headline averages rather than behind them. Elsewhere on this topic, a figure claiming documented strategies make marketers 414% more likely to report success circulates widely; it is a self-reported CoSchedule survey from 2022, and it is not evidence of anything causal. We name it here so readers recognize it, and we do not build on it.

What we left out

There are no case studies, named practitioners or client results on this page, because we have none that are real. Free public guidance does exist and costs nothing: the US Small Business Administration's marketing and sales guide sets out target market, competitive advantage, sales plan, goals, action plan, budget and ROI measurement. Our rules for citing a figure covers the rest.

Where to go deeper

Three guides carry this framework further: one for the B2B buying committee, one for the channel mix, and one for the companies that spend the largest share of revenue on marketing and have the fewest people to do it.

Questions

Marketing strategy: the questions the search box actually asks

What are the 5 main marketing strategies?
There is no standard list of five, and the search results themselves prove it: the same Google page asks for the four main, the five main, six, and seven in a single box. The count that most often sits behind "five" is the 5 Cs, a scanning checklist covering company, customers, competitors, collaborators and climate. It is a way to survey the ground before you decide, not a menu of five strategies to pick from.
What are the 7 steps of marketing strategy?
The American Marketing Association publishes a seven-step process, which is the closest thing to an answer here. It runs: conduct market research, set objectives using SMART criteria, identify the target audience and build buyer personas, craft a unique value proposition, develop the marketing mix, write a detailed action plan, then monitor and measure performance. Other publishers slice the same work into five or eight steps, so treat the number as a teaching convention rather than a standard.
What are the four main marketing strategies?
Where "four" appears, the framework underneath is usually either the 4 Ps of the marketing mix (product, price, place, promotion) or the four quadrants of the Ansoff matrix (market penetration, product development, market development, diversification). Those are different things. The 4 Ps describe execution; the Ansoff quadrants describe where growth is supposed to come from.
What is the difference between a marketing strategy and a marketing plan?
A marketing strategy is the set of long-term decisions: which customers you serve, what you offer them, how you position it, and through which channels. A marketing plan is the schedule of campaigns and tactics that executes those decisions. Coursera draws the line the same way, describing strategy as the big picture and the plan as the concrete actions.
How much should a company spend on marketing?
Marketing accounted for 9.6% of overall company budgets and 9.0% of company revenues in The CMO Survey's 2026 edition, its lowest budget share since 2021. That average hides a wide spread: B2B product companies reported 7.0% of budget, while B2C product companies reported 13.8%. Smaller companies and companies with a higher share of online sales consistently spend a larger proportion.
Should we spend more on acquiring customers or keeping them?
The data argues for a harder look at retention than most budgets currently give it. Acquisition budgets ran 26.0% larger than retention budgets in 2026, up from 19.6% a year earlier, and 82.0% of companies spend more on acquisition. Over the same period retention performance grew 12.8% while acquisition performance grew 7.4%. Money is flowing toward the weaker-performing half.
How do you prove marketing worked to a finance team?
Start by accepting that proving it is harder than doing it, which the data supports. Marketing leaders rated their ability to generate ROI from marketing technologies at 4.5 on a 7-point scale and their ability to demonstrate that ROI at 4.2. Pair a fast metric with a slow one, agree the measurement window before the campaign runs, and report the same metrics every period rather than the flattering ones.
Why does marketing get cut first when profits miss?
Because it is the easiest line to cut and the hardest to defend, and the numbers bear that out. When profits come in below expectation, 53.1% of companies focus on cutting expenses, up from 46.0% a year earlier, and marketing expenses are cut ahead of other categories 45.4% of the time. Exposure rises with company size, reaching 61.0% at companies with more than 10,000 employees.
Is a B2B marketing strategy different from a B2C one?
Different enough that the budgets do not resemble each other. B2B product companies spent 7.0% of overall budget on marketing against 13.8% for B2C product companies in 2026. The structural differences matter more: B2B sells to a committee rather than a person, runs a sales function alongside marketing, and measures pipeline rather than transactions.
How much of a marketing budget goes to social media?
Social media took 14.3% of marketing budgets in 2026, recovering after a dip the previous year. Marketers expect 17.1% within a year and 23.1% within five. Read those forecasts with a discount: across data from 2009 to 2026, 12-month social spending projections have run an average of 2.1 percentage points above what companies actually spent.
How long does marketing take to show an effect?
The median duration of marketing's impact on customers is six months, and that duration has lengthened since 2022 with more responses landing at six months, one year or longer. That is longer than most quarterly reporting cycles, which is a large part of why marketing arguments with finance stall. A campaign measured only inside the quarter it ran will systematically undercount itself.
Do we need a generative engine optimization plan yet?
A useful benchmark: 41.5% of companies already report using generative engine optimization, meaning work aimed at getting content to appear inside AI-generated search answers. That is high adoption for a category that did not appear in earlier editions of the survey at all. Whether it earns a line in your own plan depends on how much of your demand currently arrives through search.