Scott Keever: Reputation Management Spending Climbed Again in Q2 2026
Keever SEO founder points to AI search summaries as a key driver behind rising demand for reputation services
A review of business services spending in the second quarter of 2026 shows continued growth in the reputation management and search visibility sector, according to Scott Keever, founder of Keever SEO, as companies of all sizes allocate more budget toward how they appear in search results and review platforms.
Three Drivers Behind the Growth
Keever SEO points to three converging factors behind the trend:
- Consumer research habits have shifted further toward search and reviews. Fewer purchase decisions happen without at least a quick search of the business name first.
- AI-driven search tools are summarizing business reputations automatically. These summaries are harder for companies to control directly than a traditional list of search results, since the AI system decides what to include and what to leave out.
- Older content is surfacing more easily. Negative material that used to get buried on page two or three of search results can now be pulled into an AI-generated summary regardless of its position in traditional rankings.
Bundling Services
That combination has made proactive reputation strategy a bigger budget priority than in previous years. Keever SEO describes a pattern among client requests: businesses increasingly ask to bundle traditional SEO work with reputation monitoring as a single service, rather than purchasing them separately from different vendors.
The firm attributes this to a growing recognition among business owners that search rankings and reputation are, functionally, two views of the same underlying problem — and that treating them separately tends to leave gaps that competitors with a more unified strategy can exploit.
Outlook for Q3
Looking toward the third quarter, Keever SEO expects the category to keep growing, particularly among businesses operating in competitive local markets, where a handful of negative reviews or an outdated search presence can meaningfully shift customer decisions in favor of a competitor.
The firm says it is advising clients to treat the current growth in AI-summarized search as a reason to accelerate reputation investment now, rather than wait for a visible drop in traffic or conversions to justify the spend.