AI is moving past the era of viral curiosity and into something much more durable.
Job seekers are increasingly flocking to Indeed to find AI-related roles, with searches for those jobs growing 11-fold since the introduction of ChatGPT in November 2022. This increase is outpacing overall job search activity, which is roughly in line with late 2022 levels, a period marked by a large wave of job switching often referred to as the Great Resignation.
Searches for AI roles were flat through most of 2022, then roughly tripled in the months following ChatGPT’s launch. Growth then plateaued through much of 2023 and the first half of 2024, even as new models from Google, Meta, and Anthropic continued to roll out. The second major surge began in mid-2024 following the releases of Claude 3, Llama 3, and GPT-4o. Search interest then waned in late 2024 only to reaccelerate sharply in early 2025, coinciding with increased job seeker activity in January and the releases of Gemini 2.0 Flash and DeepSeek R1 in quick succession. By early 2026, after a brief pullback, we saw a steady increase and new highs in searches for AI-related roles.
What’s notable is that not every model release moves the needle equally. Job seeker interest often responds less to the steady drumbeat of new models and more to moments that break into mainstream awareness or signal a step change in capability.
While the growth is impressive, searches for AI roles remain relatively small, accounting for less than 1% of all searches in early 2026. Compare this with the Indeed AI Tracker, which uses a broader pool of keywords and shows that nearly 5% of all job postings mentioned AI or an adjacent skill requirement at the end of February 2026. However, even when tracking searches using keywords identical to those used in the AI tracker, we still see far fewer searches than postings in early 2026. In other words, job seekers are increasingly looking for artificial intelligence roles on Indeed, but the demand for those skills is outpacing the number of people directly searching for them.
Indeed’s real-time data show that workers are increasingly aware of AI and interested in roles that use it. It’s possible that new model releases and viral moments have driven some of the early interest in AI, but persistent growth since the spring of 2025 suggests that AI is becoming more mainstream. As new products emerge, we should expect searches for AI-related postings to rise. But if the steady climb since spring 2025 is any indication, AI is moving past the era of viral curiosity and into something much more durable.
Methodology
Searches for AI roles are calculated by summing daily searches for one or more of the following terms: “artificial intelligence,” “generative artificial intelligence,” “generative ai,” “ai,” or “genai.” Only major AI model releases from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, DeepSeek, and Microsoft were included. These are not exhaustive because the AI landscape has seen dozens of model updates, minor versions, and incremental releases over this period. We limited annotations to major version launches (e.g., GPT-4 but not GPT-4 Turbo, Llama 3 but not Llama 3.1) or releases that represented a notable new entrant or product category (e.g., DeepSeek R1, Bing Chat). The goal is to provide context for potential inflection points in job seeker search behavior, not to catalog every release. Inclusion does not imply that a given release caused a change in search activity, and some releases that coincide with shifts in the trend may reflect broader public attention rather than the model itself.