By IBROYS · 2026-09-12

We compared three phrases in 17 countries. "AI automation" won every single one.

Every software company describes itself in roughly the same words. Custom enterprise software development. Bespoke solutions. Digital transformation partner.

We wanted to know whether anybody actually searches for those words. So we took three phrases and compared them, market by market:

• AI automation
• custom software development
• enterprise software development

Google Trends splits interest between terms you compare, so each row below adds up to 100. We ran 17 markets. The result was the same in all of them.

The table

Not one market below 92. Not one where "enterprise software development" cleared 3%.

The part that explains it

Here is worldwide interest in "AI automation" by quarter, on Google's 0–100 index:

From 1 to 68 in two and a half years. (The last quarter is incomplete — we pulled this on 12 September, so treat 32.3 as a part-quarter figure, not a decline.)

The other two lines didn't move. This isn't a story about custom software falling out of favour. It's a story about a new phrase absorbing the attention.

What we checked next, and what broke our assumption

Trends shows relative interest, not volume. So we cross-checked in Bing Webmaster Tools, which reports actual impressions. Worldwide, last three months:

The phrase sitting on thousands of software company homepages returns no data. Not low volume. Not competitive. Simply not typed by enough people for Bing to report it.

So what should a page say?

The instinct is to swap the words and move on. That's the wrong lesson, and we nearly drew it.

Buyers do use words like "enterprise" and "custom" — when they're already talking to you, reading a proposal, justifying a decision internally. Those words work on the page. They just aren't how anyone begins.

What people search is a problem, not a category. Look at the related queries Google reports around "document automation":

legal document automation · insurance document automation · business document automation · document automation software · what is document automation

The pattern is [my industry] + [my problem] + automation. Nobody searches "custom enterprise software development" because nobody has that problem. They have visa paperwork that takes four hours per candidate.

So: write the page for the problem, in the industry's own words, and keep the enterprise vocabulary for the paragraph that reassures a buyer who has already arrived.

How we measured this

• Interest by market: Google Trends, via the open-source pytrends library, 12-month window,

pulled 12 September 2026. Three terms compared in one query so the figures are shares of the same pool. inc_low_vol=False, country resolution.

• Growth curve: same tool, 5-year window, quarterly means.
• Impressions: Bing Webmaster Tools keyword research, worldwide, 3-month window, same date.
• Limits, plainly. Trends is relative, not absolute — a 96 doesn't mean many searches, it means

most of these three. Bing is a single-digit share of search in most of these countries, so its impression counts understate real demand; use them to rank terms against each other, not to forecast traffic. And "no data" means below Bing's reporting threshold, not zero.

• Everything here can be re-run for free. No paid SEO tool was used.

IBROYS is a studio in Kerala. We build automation for document-heavy operations. We ran this study on ourselves first, and it changed the words on our own homepage.

Published 12 September 2026.

← All posts