What we went out and measured ourselves.
Explore Research
Original studies from the Hive: how AI engines answer marketing questions, what people type into a search box, and what that means for a brand. Every number comes from a named tool on a stated date.
How AI engines answer marketing questions: a citation study
We asked a live AI engine eight marketing questions and checked every source it named. It performed a live search for two of them. Of the sources it listed for the rest, 21 did not exist. This is our own test, run on one engine on one day, and the method and its limits are below.
How the AI search vocabulary moved in a year
Three terms compete to name the same worry: that buyers are asking an AI assistant instead of a search engine. We tracked all three in US search volume across a year. AI SEO is the largest, generative engine optimization peaked early and fell back, and answer engine optimization climbed from almost nothing to a real number. Our own data, fetched 14 September 2026.
What people search for in marketing: the demand map
We measured US monthly search volume for every topic a marketing reference site might cover. Three findings. Film titles are the largest entries by a wide margin, concept names beat author names by roughly two hundred to one, and two categories we had planned barely exist as searches. Our own data, fetched 14 September 2026.