SparkToro Blog

Posts by Rand Fishkin:

AI/LLMs Industry Marketing Predictions Psychology Zero Click

The 5 Big Trends that Will Dominate Marketing in 2026

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
I find most end-of-year prediction and crystal ball-gazing listicles to be trash. They don’t prove their assertions, use anecdotes rather than data at scale to back up their prognostications, and, worst of all, fail to grade their previous predictions (how the #$%@ else do you know if you can trust their current ones?!). And yes, I’m looking at you, Gartner,…
5-Minute Whiteboards AI/LLMs Data Psychology Research

Never Ask an AI Tool How It Came Up with That Answer

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
This post on LinkedIn by Britney Muller is, IMHO, the most important short piece on AI you’ll read this year. It’s so critical to understand what she’s saying here that I’ve focused this week’s 5-Minute Whiteboard on explaining and demonstrating exactly the problem she’s so succinctly captured. If you’ve ever asked ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, or Deepseek why it gave…
5-Minute Whiteboards Analytics Marketing Tactics Zero Click

The 7 Marketing Problems Pinball-Shaped Buyer Journeys Create

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Last week, I showed you how Internet buyer journeys have transformed from the cleaner, more predictable funnel model of the 2000-2015 web into something shaped like a ball bouncing around a pinball-machine. These modern buyer journeys bounce back and forth between channels and content in ways that can’t be readily modeled nor cleanly attributed (despite what your analytics tool tells…
5-Minute Whiteboards Marketing Psychology Zero Click

The Pinball Customer Journey Has Replaced the Marketing Funnel

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
I like the marketing funnel. It’s a great analogy, and has served me well for years. I *STILL* think it works reasonably well as a way to describe how businesses experience the various points at which they engage/interact with users before they become customers. But, we cannot bury our heads in the sand and pretend it’s a reasonable way to…
Hiring Personal Team

Welcoming Kristy Morrison as Chief of Staff

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Story time—late last year, I developed a painful, still-undiagnosed condition in my hands, likely from repetitive stress. Blah blah chronic pain, it’s hard to work, typing and mousework for more than 45 minutes in a row is unbearable, I’ve been to lots of doctors, followed lots of random Internet advice, whatever… I don’t really like complaining about health stuff. But,…
Agencies Product SparkToro

NEW: Upload your agency’s logo and customize your audience research graphs

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
It’s new feature month over here at SparkToro (given we’ve just launched Take Action and the enhanced usage-graph visuals), and we’re continuing the streak with the long-requested addition of white labeled, exportable graphs. Now, with an Agency/Enterprise tier account, you can: Hop over to your Account Settings page Upload your logo (PNG, JPG, or SVG up to 2MB) Customize the…
AI/LLMs Data Product SparkToro

NEW: AI Tool & Social Network Usage Graphs are in SparkToro

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
SparkToro’s data visualization just got a major upgrade, but rather than tell you about it, I’ll show you: BOOM. Rather than the previous visualization showing only the usage vs. country-level average, the new graph displays exactly the information you’ve been requesting: the percentage of the audience you search for that uses any given search engine and AI tool or social…
AI/LLMs Product SparkToro Tactics

NEW in SparkToro: Take Action combines real audience data with LLM magic to give you actionable marketing takeaways

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Let me lay out the biggest challenges folks tell us they have with SparkToro in 2025: The audience data y’all provide is interesting, but I don’t know what to do next Making the connection between our audience’s behaviors and our marketing actions requires a lot of extra work (export SparkToro report, analyze, make assessments, upload to other systems, etc.) My…
5-Minute Whiteboards AI/LLMs Content Marketing SEO Tactics

We’ve Learned More About How to Appear in AI Answers

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Thanks to some recent experiments and research in the marketing world (and an unfortunate, manipulative attack by a Reddit mod), we’ve learned a lot more about how to influence the answers AI tools provide. This is particularly relevant for those seeking to have their brand names (or websites) appear when ChatGPT, CoPilot, Claude, Gemini, or others are asked for “the…
5-Minute Whiteboards Content Marketing Psychology Startups

Make Something People Want to Talk About

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
In my formative years as a tech entrepreneur, Paul Graham (cofounder of YCombinator), wrote a seminal essay entitled: Be Good. Most tech folks have forgotten the essay itself, but almost everyone has heard the viral piece of advice that came out of that post: “Make something people want.” It’s pithy. Short. Timeless. And a great bar to measure your product,…

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