Every few months, a new headline declares that AI has finally killed Google Search.
Between ChatGPT, AI overviews and zero-click search, it’s easy to assume that paid search is headed toward irrelevance. Some marketers have responded by rushing to optimize for AI-generated answers or experimenting with emerging advertising opportunities before the economics have been proven.
The excitement is understandable, but the conclusions are premature.
While consumer search behavior is undoubtedly evolving, the advertising data tells a very different story. Paid search remains one of the most reliable, profitable and widely adopted channels in the marketing mix. Rather than abandoning search, successful brands are recalibrating its role while continuing to invest where returns remain strongest.
Paid search remains stable
According to data from over 275 brands in the Keen ecosystem, paid search has held steady since 2023, accounting for 15% of all ad investments.
Despite declining from its peak of 22% in 2022, when tools like ChatGPT were introduced, advertisers still see clear value in the channel. Adoption also remains strong. Eighty percent of brands continue to invest in paid search, aligning with trends from previous years.
Even as overall budgets came down, the average brand spent 17% more absolute dollars on search year-over-year. This proves that brands are expanding other parts of their media mix faster than cutting search investments.
Performance supports that strategy. Paid search continues to generate a healthy $1.39 profit ROI, proving that marketers have right-sized a mature channel without sacrificing efficiency.
Rather than signaling decline, this shift reflects how the channel’s role is changing within a broader, more diversified media mix.
Search thrives while other channels falter
If AI were quietly eroding paid search, we’d expect marketers to shift budget elsewhere. That’s not what the data shows.
Over the same period, several major media channels have experienced steep declines.
Linear television has seen the most dramatic contraction, falling from a 30% market share in 2021 to less than 7% in 2025, while also experiencing declining ROI. Meanwhile, streaming video has declined from 10.9% of investment in 2022 to 7.4% in 2025 and social media has followed a similar trajectory, dropping from 13.1% to 8.4%.
Against that backdrop, paid search has been one of the market’s most resilient channels. Channels widely viewed as the future of advertising have seen greater budget compression than search.
If AI and zero-click were fundamentally disrupting paid search today, marketers would already be reallocating budgets accordingly. Instead, the opposite has occurred.
Winners lean into search
Perhaps the strongest evidence comes from the brands outperforming their competitors.
Among companies achieving more than 5% year-over-year sales volume growth and at least 5% net present value (NPV), paid search accounts for 23% of total advertising spend. For all other brands, that figure is just 13.2%.
These high-growth brands also earn a significantly higher return on investment at $1.64 compared to $1.33 for their peers. In a period of AI-driven search anxiety, top performers remain committed to search because it continues to produce measurable business results.
The future of the market
Emerging AI and zero-click platforms have not reached a level of maturity required for brands to abandon paid search. Marketers are skeptical about some of the results generated by AI and are slow to move dollars into early-stage ad offerings, as evidenced by slow growth of ChatGPT’s ad offerings.
Emerging platforms must prove they can consistently deliver ROI comparable to or better than paid search before earning a larger share of media budgets. Until then, marketers shouldn’t mistake headlines for evidence.
Paid search has spent nearly three decades becoming one of the most measurable and dependable advertising channels. AI eventually may redefine how consumers search, but the current data proves it hasn’t yet redefined what works today.
Smart brands are following the returns and those returns continue to point to search.
