SparkToro Blog

Posts by Rand Fishkin:

Data Research Zero Click

New Research: Influence Happens Everywhere, an analysis of the 5,000 most-visited sites on the mobile and desktop web

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Several weeks ago, I published some important research about where search happens on the web. Spoiler: everywhere, but ~73% is still Google. This data, fascinating as it is, begets another question – where does influence happen? What do people read, watch, listen-to, browse, and surf on the web *before* they search? For answers, I turned to our longtime friends at…
AI/LLMs Data Product SparkToro

NEW in SparkToro: Uncover the AI Prompt Topics Your Audience is Using in ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Claude, and more

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
“Rand, I love that SparkToro tells me which search and AI tools my audience is using, but… could you also tell me what they’re searching and prompting?” For a long time, the answer was only yes to 50% of that request. Starting today, we’ve got it all. Research any audience in SparkToro and we’ll show you the prompt topics they’re…
AI/LLMs Product SparkToro

How Much is Your Audience Searching Google vs. Prompting AI Tools? SparkToro’s Answers Just Got an Upgrade

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
For the past year, SparkToro’s had the remarkable ability to tell you how much your audience used Google vs. ChatGPT, Perplexity vs. Yahoo, Claude vs. Bing, and dozens of other search engines and AI tools. But… well, we’re a bit embarassed to say this… that data used clickstream visitation, NOT search and prompting activity. When we conducted our research last…
Data Research SEO Startups Zero Click

New Research: Search Happens Everywhere; an Analysis of 41 Websites with Significant Search Activity

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
For 25 years, web search meant Google (and a little bit of Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo). But in the past 2.5 years, it’s often expanded to include the major AI tools: ChatGPT, Claude, Deepseek, CoPilot, and Gemini. We found this broader definition welcome, but a little strange. If ChatGPT is search, why isn’t Instagram? Or YouTube? Or Amazon? It struck…
AI/LLMs Data Research

NEW Research: AIs are highly inconsistent when recommending brands or products; marketers should take care when tracking AI visibility

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Editor’s Note: We’re hosting an exclusive webinar on March 11 to walk through the findings of this study. Join us live or sign up to receive the recording. The Problem: For the last few years, companies have been investing inordinate sums into AI tracking and AI visibility for their brands and products. $100M+/yr is already estimated to be spent on…
AI/LLMs Product SparkToro

Starting today anyone can analyze any (describable) audience in SparkToro

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Until now, if you wanted to research an audience with SparkToro, you needed to choose a particular website, a search keyword, or a URL to analyze…. No more. As of today’s launch, we’re now providing the ability to describe, in natural language, any audience, with any restrictions or specificity you want, and get data about their demographics and behaviors. You…
5-Minute Whiteboards Research Zero Click

How to Overcome the “Link in Comments” Problem on LinkedIn and Other Social Platforms

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Those pesky, anti-link, pro-native-content social platforms are at it again, muzzling the visibility of links anywhere and everywhere they can. Sure, they occasionally let something especially high-performing through, but as we learned when Twitter open-sourced its algo, these systems intentionally and consistently demote content with links… But… Amanda and I have been working on ways to outsmart these systems for…
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…

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