Survey Says! AI Images and Video Lead AI Creative Searches

If ‘Image Generation and AI Art’ were a Family Feud guess, it would be the top answer for AI creative searches nationwide.

It’s not a surprise that a lot of people are searching Google looking for creative AI services, given the amount of AI-generated content on social sites these days. The latter might even help explain why the largest number of these searches are specifically for image generation and AI art, not only in the US as a whole, but in each of the 50 states. It also might explain why the number two slot in every state is video creation and editing.

It’s also not surprising that the state with the most searches for creative AI services was California, since it’s by far the most populated state in the country, but the Golden State drops to the second position if searches are broken down by population, which is probably the most meaningful way to look at rankings like these. For example, a recent study indicates that in a typical month, 3,777 searches for such services are made out of a pool of 100,000 New York state residents, while the number for the same metric in California is 3,700.

At the bottom of the per capita list is Mississippi, with 1,924 searches per 100,000 population.

These numbers were supplied by the AI-focused creative services company, Superside, which mainly creates material for advertising and marketing, but also delves into branding, web design, video production, and the like. The company recently conducted a study in which it analyzed average monthly Google searches across nine categories. The company said that searches were calculated per 100,000 residents using 2025 population estimates, adding that “the results measure search interest rather than actual usage,” which sounds suspiciously like something AI would say… or maybe not. A company spokesperson came up with the following statement, seemingly without a prompt:

“That doesn’t always mean asking AI to create the finished thing from scratch. Someone might use an image tool to get a rough idea out of their head, test a few directions before choosing one or adapt an existing visual for a different size. With video, it could be a storyboard, captions, small edits or turning a longer piece into several shorter clips. There are a lot of fairly ordinary jobs sitting underneath those search numbers.”

Something else the spokesperson notes is that breaking the numbers down by states doesn’t really offer any sort of causal relationship:

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“New York and California have obvious links to advertising, entertainment and media, but Utah, Virginia, Georgia, and Nevada all make the top 10 too. Businesses need social posts, presentations, videos, and website content wherever they are based, not only in the traditional creative centers.”

Yup. Businesses are everywhere, and businesses advertise locally in each of the 50 states. Also, these days a lot of retail companies promote themselves heavily on social platforms such as Facebook, where they employ not only graphic design, but videos as well. This might help explain why the third most searched category is productivity and workflow automation, which indicates searches likely aren’t coming from a homemaker or retired senior looking to learn something about crafting using AI.

“It isn’t as eye-catching as an AI image or video, but it may be closer to how these tools end up being used day to day. Creative work involves plenty of repetitive tasks, version changes and back and forth. Saving a little time on each of those can matter more than producing one impressive image.”

That being said, I could see my local community center teaching workshops on using AI as a crafting tool…

Here’s the list for all 50 states, so you can see how you rank nationally.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

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