"Any reports of the death of paid search are premature, even as answer engine optimization reshapes brand discovery."

New data from marketing intelligence platform Funnel, which handles roughly 11% of all global digital ad spend, finds paid search growing at 122% over the 15 months leading up to April 2026, from $45 million to $100 million in the US alone. Paid search retains its position as the largest channel in the digital marketing ecosystem across all regions, despite the rapid rise of answer engine optimization as a competing discipline for brand visibility investment.

The growth is concentrated, as it has been for years, in two platforms. Google Ads posted year-on-year increases of 112% in EMEA to $110 million and 41% in the US to $99 million. Facebook Ads grew 148% in EMEA to $62 million and 211% in the US to $84 million. Those figures align with Alphabet's Q2 2026 earnings, published July 22, which showed Google Search and Other revenue up 17% year over year to $63.27 billion, a rate that eased from 19% in Q1 but remains well above the pace most analysts expected given the scale of AI search adoption.

Social media spend grew faster than paid search in the same period, at 150% from $26 million to $65 million. In EMEA, social has now claimed the second spot in digital ad spend rankings, displacing display advertising into third place. TikTok's EMEA spend rose from $2 million in January 2024 to $12 million by April 2026, placing it in the top five platforms in the region for the first time. The US is described as on the same trajectory, a few quarters behind.

APAC growth was the most dramatic in the dataset, at 400% across the period. November remains the single largest month for digital ad spend globally, with EMEA Black Friday receipts doubling from $125 million in 2024 to $270 million in 2025.

What This Means for AEO Investment

The Funnel data does not challenge the case for AEO investment, it contextualises it. Paid search is growing because it is measurable, attributable, and fast. AEO is growing because it is building the brand authority that determines which brands get recommended before a buyer ever runs a paid search. The two disciplines are not substitutes. Brands that treat them as competing budget lines are misreading the dynamic.

The more significant signal in the data is what it implies about the transition timeline. If paid search spend is still accelerating at 122% despite widespread awareness of AI search's rise, the brands that have already begun building AEO infrastructure are not early adopters, they are simply ahead of a curve that is still forming. The window for first-mover advantage in AI citation is open, but the Funnel data suggests it will not stay open indefinitely.

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