This question deserves a contrarian answer.
Industry benchmarks suggest that businesses typically allocate around seven percent of annual revenue to marketing. That’s the conventional framework. Here’s the unconventional take: the more important question isn’t how much you’re spending on AI search optimization — it’s whether your entire marketing strategy is being directed by what it takes to appear in large language model responses.
We believe it should be. AI-generated answers are increasingly the first — and sometimes only — touchpoint between a potential customer and a brand. If your marketing strategy isn’t structured around earning a place in those answers, you may be spending your full marketing budget on channels that are losing relevance faster than most people realize.
The cost of AI search optimization isn’t a separate line item. It’s a reorientation — pointing your existing content investment, your social strategy, your video production, your community engagement, and your thought leadership toward the goal of building the kind of authoritative, comprehensive, well-distributed body of work that AI systems recognize, trust, and cite.
A good place to begin that reorientation, at no cost: CARL Intelligence gives you up to six months free to start tracking your AI visibility, understand your current standing in large language model responses, and get guided recommendations on where to focus your efforts first.
