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Posts by Rand Fishkin:

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,…
Data Industry Marketing Research

New Research: 20% of Americans use AI tools 10X+/month, but growth is slowing and traditional search hasn’t dipped

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
The media hype may be overblown, but the data doesn’t lie: over 20% of Americans are now heavy users of AI Tools (employing them 10X or more each month), and nearly 40% use one AI tools 1X+/month. Despite this massive growth, traditional search engines aren’t going anywhere: 95% of Americans continue to use them each month, and 86% are heavy…
Data Product SparkToro

How to Find Hyper-Specific Audiences with SparkToro’s New AI Features

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
It’s time we pulled back the curtain on one of SparkToro’s newest superpowers: Conversational Queries (a.k.a. audience descriptions), powered by AI. Instead of analyzing specified-parameter audiences like “Wix.com visitors” or “people with architect in their bio,” you can now zero in on groups as broad or specific as you like — small law firms seeking to improve their websites or…
Data Product SparkToro

SparkToro’s New Graph Visualizations Make Copy/Paste/Present Easy as Pie

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Starting today, there are customizable graph visuals in almost every section of SparkToro’s reports. Because why the heck should you have to be an Excel visualization expert on top of the 500 other things your boss/team/client expects of you? Friends, we’ve got your back. When you need to make the case for an investment in a particular social channel you…
5-Minute Whiteboards Analytics Marketing Zero Click

Exactly What to Measure with Lift Based Marketing Investments

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
How do you earn budget if attribution is dead and traffic is vanity metric? Lift-based experimentation. That’s when, rather than try to assign a weight to every potential channel or tactic you (or an algorithm) think contributed to a particular conversion, you measure the lift in conversions that happen after a particular tactic or channel begins. Weirdly, it’s less precise,…
5-Minute Whiteboards Analytics Marketing

In a Zero-Click World, Traffic is a Terrible Goal

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
60% of marketers say their top goal for the next 12 months is “increasing traffic.” And 59% say their primary KPI is… also traffic. To all those folks, I say: you’re about to have a terrible, horrible, no-good year. The Internet is sending less traffic. Period. That’s a provable fact, and it’s true for every source of referral traffic —…
5-Minute Whiteboards Data Product SparkToro Tactics

How to Use SparkToro + LLMs to Do Marketing Magic

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Most folks who follow me know I’m a bit of a late adopter and skeptic of AI. Yes, it can do some impressive things that takes humans a long, painful amount of time to replicate. But, they’re also stereotype machines whose reasoning and capabilities, especially in the creative and novel needs that marketing demands, isn’t replacing even 1% of jobs…

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