SparkToro Blog

Posts by Rand Fishkin:

Data Product SparkToro

Are your customers switching to AI tools (and how much)? SparkToro’s new Search & AI Tools feature has the answers

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
There is a lot of activity moving to LLMs and generative AI tools right now, and for marketers, founders, and creators, the questions are almost always the same: Are my customers moving from traditional methods of discovery to these platforms? If so, how much? Starting today, SparkToro has the answers. Using clickstream panels from our partners at Datos, we’re able…
Data Industry Marketing Research SEO

New Research: We analyzed 332 million queries over 21 months to uncover never-before-published data on how people use Google

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Google is a massive presence on the modern web. They’ve held 90%+ of the global search market share for 15 years. Even the rise of AI tools has been unable to budge that number (so far). They get <9% of all web visits, but send more than 60% of all referring traffic to other sites. Google is certainly one of…
Advertising Content Marketing Industry Marketing Psychology Tactics

If your audience’s sources of influence and your marketing budget don’t align, you’re gonna have a bad time

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Yes, this is a rant. It’s a rant about where leadership teams allocate their marketing budget vs. where their potential customers actually pay attention. For most, that’s heavily in digital performance ads (Meta, Google, Apple, and if you’re in e-commerce, Amazon/Pinterest), a healthy amount in social media/brand ads (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, maybe Reddit), and then a bit of “content marketing,”…
Personal Startups

Snackbar Studio Raised $2.15M Using SparkToro’s Funding Model (and we’re open sourcing the docs)

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Since SparkToro’s founding in 2018, I’ve been been passionately loud about our unique funding model (becase it’s a really good idea.) The model focuses on chill work, sustainability over growth-at-any-cost, and offers investors and founders a lower-risk way to benefit from long-term, profitable operation. Several companies and funds have used our structure to raise money since, including accelerator program TinySeed…
Content Marketing Product SparkToro

NEW: Topics, Interests, and Content Ideas Now Live in SparkToro V2

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Starting today, SparkToro V2 has an entirely new capability—The Topics Section—that adds massive value for content strategy, content creation, and/or audience research applications. In fact, this new data is what our customers told us (in a September survey) was the most valuable missing piece in the product: Let me show you what it can do, and why I’m so excited…
5-Minute Whiteboards Marketing SparkToro Tactics

How Can My Brand Appear in Answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Other AI/LLM Tools?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
It’s no surprise that marketers, founders, and business owners are starting to ask how their brands can be returned in the answers given by AI/LLM tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. But it’s downright shocking how difficult it is to find high-quality, accurate information about how to do this. Granted, you could just ask ChatGPT (the first answer is decent,…
5-Minute Whiteboards Advertising Data Industry Marketing Predictions

Is Google Losing Search Market Share?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
A recent Wall Street Journal made the top of feeds in the digital marketing world, claiming that Google is on the precipice of losing the lead in the search advertising wars. Supposedly, in 2025, for the first time, Google may fall under 50% of market share in search advertising (according to an eMarketer report the WSJ cites). The WSJ points…
5-Minute Whiteboards Data Marketing Predictions SEO Tactics

How to Fight Back Against a Traffic-Less Web

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Surveys, studies, analytics… they all show the same thing: getting traffic on the web is harder than ever and it’s getting worse much faster in the last 2 years than the decade before. Site owners are faced with two options: compete for the scraps Google and the other platforms provide, or play the game differently by engaging in Zero-Click answers,…
5-Minute Whiteboards Agencies Marketing Tactics

How Do We Anchor Content Marketing Efforts in a Multi-Platform Distribution World?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
This week, I’m taking a full 8 minutes because I want to address an incredibly important email from Russell Wojcik of Liquibase that came in reply to my previous 5-Minute Whiteboard on Content Marketing Evolving Beyond SEO: What distribution point do we rally around if it’s not just keyword rankings in Google? It’s a fair question because, for many content…

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