SEO budget 2027: three line items instead of one

Defending a single line called "SEO budget" in front of leadership will not work in 2027. Toby Brissett proposes splitting it into three independent categories with different justification logic — the way an investment portfolio is built, not the way a software subscription is renewed.

The first is the maintenance floor: money for what the business already runs on. Technical health, keeping commercial pages current, speed, fixing regressions. That is not growth, it is insurance against losing what already produces revenue. The second is the growth budget, where every line has to connect to a specific business outcome — qualified leads, revenue, pipeline. The third is experimentation: funding for hypotheses about emerging search behaviours, each with a deadline and a decision trigger written in advance.

Why now comes down to click data. The piece ran on Search Engine Land, citing Pew figures: with AI summaries present, users clicked traditional results 8% of the time versus 15% without them, and in early 2026 more than two-thirds of U.S. Google searches ended without a click at all. Building an annual plan on the assumption that traffic holds is no longer the conservative option — it is the risky one.

What to put into the budget defence:

• scenarios for the year — defensive, expected and expansion — with a clear threshold for switching between them;
• reallocation rules: what change in evidence moves money from growth into experimentation and back;
• an honest note on attribution limits, with suggestive signals in their place: brand mentions, citations in AI answers;
• a deadline and a kill criterion for every hypothesis, so tests do not drag through the whole year.

The annual SEO budget stops being a promise and becomes a working hypothesis. Whoever has written down in advance what evidence would change the plan looks stronger to finance than whoever promises growth and later explains why it did not arrive.