Your Q4 Budget is Built on 2024 Search Data – 3 New Reports to Reset
Last year, I argued that CMOs were facing tough challenges and needed an economist on staff, real market research, and a “Search Every Area for Improvement” mentality to move forward. Judging by how many Q4 plans are still under construction, it seems that most CMOs haven’t taken the advice, which means that digital marketing leaders, SEO experts, content strategists, and entrepreneurs who are doing this planning now are still doing it hard.
Three pieces of data sat over several days this month, and none of them were written with the other two in mind. Together, they paint a more useful picture of Q4 2026 planning and budget 2027 than either of them alone.
The first is the University of Michigan’s preliminary Consumer Sentiment Index for June 2026, which ticked up to 9% after the drop in gas prices but remains below 19% last year. The second is the new Public Record survey by Anthropic, released on the same day, which is the first wave of an ongoing series that follows the way Americans feel about AI, based on almost 52,000 respondents included in November and December 2025. The third is SparkToro’s new click data that shows that 68% of US Google searches now end without a click, or only 2 visits to open the web to only 2. 37% in the last two years.
Each of these is a real story on its own. Together, they will greatly improve your chances of successfully navigating the perfect storm.
What Everyone Really Says
Michigan’s number is the center of the economy. Consumer sentiment rising 9% sounds like good news, and it is, but it is recovering from a record low and remains well below where it stood last year, with inflation expectations still elevated. With the Q4 budgets, the practical lesson is that the household spending warning doesn’t go away just because one month is marked up. If your Q4 campaigns take a confident buyer, this is the number: not yet, and probably not in Q4 either.
The Anthropic Public Record data is a layer of audience status, and the headline number to note is that job loss caused by AI is the most common fear related to AI in all states, at 64% nationally. That “every single district” detail is more important than the top line. Because the sample is large enough to break out regionally, it’s really useful for anyone running local or regional campaigns. You can see if job loss concerns are higher or lower in your particular market than the national average, and adjust how AI-related messaging is done accordingly. What this data cannot do is predict anything. It is a snapshot of one study conducted in the past six months; attitudes about AI are moving fast, and Anthropic itself puts this as the first in an ongoing series because one wave is not a trend line at the moment.
The 23% web-to-open number is the cornerstone of search behavior, and the one with the most direct budget implications. Two years ago, about 37 out of 100 searches sent a visitor somewhere on the open web. Now it’s close to 23. That’s not a slight drift; reallocating the structure where attention goes after someone searches, and it was happening around the release of the AI overview and now it’s I/O 2026 for re-search. If a reasonable share of your 2026 budget was allocated based on where the clicks went in 2024, that share is now built into a search environment that is nearly two years old.
Why are these 3 in the same meeting
Michigan data says consumers are still money-conscious. Anthropic data says that most of them, across all states, also have some concerns about AI itself, which shapes how they react to AI-forward messages once they arrive. SparkToro’s data says that few of those buyers land on your site, even if they’re looking.
None of these three data points predict Q4. But a Q4 plan that doesn’t account for all three, a cautious consumer, an audience with real AI-related concerns, and a shrinking segment of open web traffic, is a plan built into the 2024 map of the 2026 world.
3 Steps to Season Planning
First, before allocating a 2027 budget across channels, pull your own math and compare the share of traffic and conversions from organic search now compared to two years ago. The figure of 23% is the national average; your number may have gone higher or lower, and that gap is an actual adjustment, not the national number itself.
Second, if your market has more than a handful of customers in one region or region, look up that country’s unemployment rate in Anthropic’s data and use it as a gauge of AI adoption in that market specifically, not as a universally applicable national rule.
Third, build your Q4 spending projections around Michigan’s trend line, not a single month. One month of improvement after a record low is not the same as recovery, and campaigns that think discretionary spending is back may be planning for a buyer that hasn’t arrived yet.
Each of the three sources updates on a different schedule: monthly in Michigan, ongoing in the new Anthropic series, and periodically with SparkToro’s open web click data. None of them is the whole picture in itself. That’s the point.
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Featured image: N Universe/Shutterstock
