GEO requests are climbing faster than Google ranking requests among search freelancers, at least in the survey Fiverr released on 21 September under the name 2026 Holiday Marketing Index. The platform polled several hundred of its top-rated freelancers across eight countries about what their retail clients are asking for ahead of the holiday season. The number deserves a careful read, because it describes what people are buying rather than what actually works. Here is what the figures say, what they leave out, and how to use them when you run a small website.
TL;DR
67% of search freelancers report rising GEO requests from their clients.
56% report rising demand for traditional Google ranking work.
Both lines go up together, so one discipline is replacing the other nowhere in this data.
These figures measure purchasing behaviour, with nothing said about results obtained.
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What the Fiverr survey actually counts behind GEO requests
The headline number is easy to state. Among the search specialists Fiverr polled, 67% report more client demand for GEO, the practice of optimising to be cited by generative answer engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity. Over the same window, 56% report more demand for traditional Google ranking work. That eleven-point gap was enough to produce headlines about one discipline overtaking the other.
Read the second line before drawing conclusions. both demand curves rise inside the same survey, which describes a marketing budget getting wider rather than money moving from one line to another. Search Engine Journal, covering the release, points out that the same panel still puts Google search at the top of its long-term investment list. Retailers are adding a GEO line to the order while keeping the SEO one.
One caveat belongs right here, and it comes from the outlet that covered the story. The Fiverr release on GEO becoming its fastest-growing service keeps to itself the total sample size, the exact number of search specialists questioned, the collection dates and the wording of the questions. A platform survey of its own sellers remains a decent snapshot of a services market. It carries less weight than an independent measurement.
The survey covers eight markets, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Canada and Australia, which makes the pattern broader than a single-country effect. What it cannot tell you is whether any of that spending produced citations. Demand for a service and results from that service are two separate measurements, and only the first one appears in this report. Treat the number as a signal about where the market is heading, then judge any individual provider on what they actually deliver.
Advice is displacing execution in freelance briefs
The quieter finding in this report speaks more directly to small sites. 83% of the search specialists surveyed say clients now hire them for advice and strategy rather than for execution. The figure sits at 79% among e-commerce specialists and 76% among content creators.
The shift makes sense. Producing a text, a tag or a product description costs almost nothing in machine time today, so the value moves toward the decision: what to produce, for which search intent, in what order. knowing what to do now costs more than doing it in most quotes going out this autumn. The report also flags that 61% of independent contractors see clients asking for a discount purely because AI is involved, while 89% of those same clients judge the work on its final result.
For anyone paying the invoice, the practical consequence is direct. A service sold as GEO can mean a citation audit, a page rewrite, off-site brand work, or all three at once. Asking for the exact deliverable before signing avoids the classic disappointment of a ten-page report with no change applied to the site. The most useful GEO requests for a small business tend to look a lot like solid editorial work anyway: pages that answer one question precisely, with verifiable sources and a clearly identified company behind them.
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What a small site should take from this, and in which order
On a site that is still finding its feet, the practical lesson comes down to sequencing. A page Google ranks nowhere has thin odds of being picked up by a generative engine, since those engines draw heavily on the same sources. Published measurements show that most pages cited by AI already sit high in Google results, which puts GEO requests back in their real place as a layer resting on existing foundations.
That said, one piece of GEO work starts on day one and costs nothing: how your brand is described everywhere outside your own domain. Studies indicate that brand mentions carry real weight in AI answers, sometimes more than inbound links. A complete business listing, up-to-date profile pages and a handful of mentions on sites in your sector all belong to the useful pile, whatever the trend of the season happens to be.
There is a second reason to start with the ordinary work. Generative engines rebuild their answers constantly, and a page that gets cited this month can disappear from the same answer next month without any warning or explanation. Search rankings move too, but they move slowly enough to be diagnosed. Building on the surface that gives you feedback makes the whole thing easier to steer, especially when nobody on the team has time to watch a dashboard every week.
Before commissioning anything, spend half an hour checking your AI citations by hand. Open the engines, ask the questions your buyers ask, and note what comes back. The survey puts the majority of freelance projects in the 150 to 300 dollar range, the order of magnitude of a one-off intervention. Walking into that conversation already knowing where you stand changes what you ask for, and usually what you get.
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