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Posts by Rand Fishkin:

AI/LLMs Data Product SparkToro

SparkToro’s MCP Server is Now Live — Connect Audience Research Directly to Your Favorite AI Tool

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Anything AI can do… AI can do better with SparkToro. We (and dozens of our customers) have detailed over and over how real audience data + AI tool prompts = marketing insight magic, so I won’t belabor the point here. But, I will, with great excitement, introduce an easier-than-ever way to complete that process without ever needing to leave your…
Marketing Product SparkToro

Total Addressable Market (TAM) Size is Now in SparkToro Reports

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Casey’s back with a brand new invention. This time, it’s estimated TAM: Total Addressable Market Size, one of the most requested features from SparkToro customers that we’re thrilled to finally have in the app. In any SparkToro report, you’ll now see TAM at the top of your reports, alongside a methodology breakdown, e.g. Audience for the above report: Computational chemists…
Data Research SEO Zero Click

Zero-Click Searches: Highest in the UK, Lowest in Germany, and France has the Most Efficient Searchers

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Last week, we published data in concert with Similarweb showing the latest rates of Google’s Zero-Click Searches in the United States. As promised, we’re following up with that same data pulled from Similarweb’s mobile + desktop clickstream panel for 5 additional countries: The United Kingdom – with the highest rate of Zero-Click Searches in this analysis France – whose rate…
Data Marketing Research SEO Zero Click

In 2026, Less than One Third of Google Searches Still Send a Click

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
In the first four months of 2026, a whopping 68.01% of Google searches ended without a click. Thanks to AI features, instant answers, UI elements that keep searchers in the results, and shifting user preferences, Google is becoming a walled garden. Their financial and stock performance suggests that these changes boosted both ad revenue and investor confidence, and thus, it’s…
Predictions Psychology SEO Tactics Zero Click

Inimitable Product is the New “Make Great Content”

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
For 25 years, Google told websites to “just make great content,” and they’d sort out the rest. This advice was incomplete, problematic, and reductive, but also… sorta true. If you made 10X Content in 1997, 2007, or 2017, it often worked (at least, so long as you *marketed* that 10X content). But, no more. Google’s future is no longer indexing…
5-Minute Whiteboards SEO Zero Click

5 Strategic Features that Predict Survival in the Zero-Click Era

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
No amount of tactical excellence can save you. That’s the lesson in the zero-click era — you can be the best meme-maker on social, the greatest editor in short-form video, the best keyword researcher the SEO world has ever known… it won’t matter. If your website and business model are things Google and AI can disintermediate, they will. This is…
Product SEO SparkToro

NEW Upgraded Keyword Data in SparkToro’s Audience Research Reports

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
One of the challenges we face at SparkToro is deciding between comprehensiveness vs. relevance in the audience data we deliver. In a nutshell, it’s the difference between knowing all the behaviors an audience might have (including the weird, random affinities, strange correlations, and surprising overlaps) vs. the ones that are most useful and compelling to a marketing campaign. Historically, we’ve…
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…

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