Search traffic pulled into AI chatbots and AI-generated answers is not simply vanishing, according to a keyword-level analysis of the search economy’s actual ledger. Fractl and Search Engine Land examined more than a million high-volume keywords, covering search behavior for 379 brands across eight industries, and found the story is redistribution, not collapse. The stakes are practical: a FinTech content team facing a decline in tracked search volume needs a different playbook than a SaaS team growing at nearly the opposite rate.
The analysis covered 1,010,848 keywords, each generating at least 10,000 monthly searches, representing 35.4 billion in aggregate monthly volume. Fractl, co-founded by the report’s author, Kelsey Libert, measured year-over-year keyword volume change as of April 2026. Fractl and Search Engine Land also jointly surveyed 1,004 U.S. consumers on their AI and search habits.
Across the full dataset, 29% of search volume is now in measurable decline, four percentage points above the 25% drop Gartner projected for 2026 in a 2024 forecast. That single number obscures wide variation by vertical. FinTech lost the most volume, declining 37.7%, while Lifestyle lost the least at 15.2%. Only Insurance, SaaS, and Lifestyle came in under Gartner’s original threshold; FinTech, HealthTech, and Wellness landed well above it.
The offsetting growth is where the redistribution framing earns its keep. Of the tracked keywords, 40.7% declined by more than 15% and 20.1% grew by the same threshold, but the growing keywords carried enough volume each that the two sides nearly balanced. Declining keywords added up to roughly 10.29 billion in monthly searches against 10.31 billion from growing keywords, a net gain of 16.8 million searches a month across the dataset. That balance is a portfolio-level artifact, not a guarantee for any single brand. A FinTech or HealthTech publisher losing volume on informational queries has no structural claim on the transactional growth landing in SaaS and Lifestyle categories.
The pattern maps cleanly onto how each vertical’s queries function. Categories where a chatbot can deliver a complete answer, such as a deductible explanation or a drug-interaction summary, are the ones losing search volume. Categories that require a person to compare prices or complete a transaction are holding steady or growing. Lifestyle and SaaS post the strongest growth-to-decline ratios in the dataset, at 2.6x and 2.5x. HealthTech sits at an inverted 0.4x, the most disrupted vertical Fractl measured.
Exposure also tracks with how much of a vertical’s search volume is non-branded, meaning the query names no company or product a user must reach. Non-branded queries make up 90% of all tracked volume, with HealthTech at 99.6% and Wellness at 98.5%. Insurance at 73.8% and SaaS at 82.0% carry less non-branded exposure, and both are among the verticals still growing.
The consumer side of the study adds a demand-side confirmation. Fractl and Search Engine Land’s survey found that 59% of consumers are likely to visit a brand’s website after an AI chatbot mentions it. Eighteen percent have already bought something on an AI recommendation without a separate search to verify it. Gen Z and millennial respondents were 2.5 times more likely than baby boomers to buy on an unverified AI recommendation, at 20% versus 7%.
Consumer trust has not shifted as far as the traffic data has. In the survey, 46% of respondents said they trust traditional search more than AI, compared with 20% who trust AI more, and 52% expect Google to remain their primary search tool five years from now. The reasons people give for preferring AI are usability complaints, not verdicts on accuracy: better cross-source summaries and faster answers rank highest.
For any SEO team not already segmenting keyword performance by transactional versus informational intent, this dataset from Fractl and Search Engine Land is the audit to run this quarter, not the aggregate 29% decline figure. A brand sitting on the HealthTech or FinTech side of that split needs an AI-visibility strategy for the queries a chatbot now answers in full. No downstream click exists to recover through better on-page optimization alone.
Search Engine Land published the analysis, written by Fractl co-founder Kelsey Libert, on July 2, 2026.
