Our HighLevel Release Velocity Study Made the News. Here Is What It Found

I spent the last few weeks doing something slightly obsessive: counting every single new-feature announcement HighLevel published on its official changelog. All of them, for 22 weeks straight. The result turned into a full research study, and this week it made the news. NewsRamp covered it under the headline HighLevel's AI-Fueled Release Velocity Hits 22.7 Per Week, and the announcement went out through Newsworthy.ai, complete with a podcast episode and a Substack discussion.

Here is what the numbers say, and more importantly, what I think you should do about them if you run an agency or a small business on the platform.

What we measured

Between March 3 and August 5, 2026, HighLevel published 500 new-feature announcements on its public changelog. That is 22.7 per week, a pace equivalent to roughly 1,180 announcements per year. We pulled every entry directly from the changelog API, deduplicated by entry ID, and classified each one by category. The full dataset, monthly charts and methodology are in the complete release velocity study, and every number is reproducible from the public changelog.

The headline finding: AI is now the biggest category

Of the 500 announcements, 79 introduce or extend AI functionality. That is 15.8 percent, more than messaging (66), workflow automation (60), payments (47) or core CRM (47). And in our classification, the AI category was dominated by agentic features: autonomous agents that react to CRM events, connect to outside tools through MCP, run on their own schedules, and handle voice calls from start to finish. This is not a chatbot sprinkle. It is a platform reorganizing itself around AI that acts.

What this means for your agency

Three practical conclusions I have taken into my own client work:

• Stop evaluating platforms on feature checklists. At 22.7 announcements a week, any comparison article you read is partially out of date within a month. Judge direction and velocity instead, and check dates on everything.
• The resale economics changed quietly. Recent releases let agencies rebill AI at fixed per-unit rates and resell tiered AI plans under their own brand. AI stopped being a cost line and became inventory with a margin you control.
• Watch the pipeline, not just the releases. Features in private beta today are your service offering next quarter. We track every beta, Labs toggle and rollout timeline weekly on the free HighLevel Beta Watch.

Why I published this as open research

Most content in this niche is opinion. I wanted something a skeptical reader could verify: public data source, stated methodology, reproducible counts, and a clear line between what the data shows and what I think it means. That is also why the study carries a date and gets updated as new months of data accumulate.

Frequently Asked Questions

How fast does HighLevel ship new features?

Based on 500 changelog announcements between March and August 2026, HighLevel publishes 22.7 new-feature announcements per week on average, with monthly volumes ranging from 66 to 128.

Is AI really the largest HighLevel release category?

Yes. 79 of the 500 analyzed entries (15.8 percent) introduce or extend AI functionality, ahead of messaging, workflows, payments and core CRM. Most are agentic features rather than simple content generation.

Can I verify the numbers myself?

Yes. Every figure comes from the public changelog at ideas.gohighlevel.com and the counts are reproducible from it. The methodology is documented in the full study.

See the platform behind the numbers

If the shipping pace is what convinces you, the fastest way to evaluate HighLevel is from the inside. Start a free 30-day trial here and test the AI features on a real campaign while they are still ahead of the market.