Hold onto your butts. Rand’s got new research and it’s a doozy. With Similarweb’s clickstream panel, Rand found that in the first four months of 2026, 68% of U.S. Google searches ended without a click. Not without a click to your site — without a click to anywhere. Less than a third of searches now
In 2026, Less than One Third of Google Searches Still Send a Click
By 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
How We’d Market to Software Developers at Startups
By How do you market to developers? Developers have a reputation: they block your ads, they smell marketing-speak from three sentences away, they trust a random GitHub repo over your whole campaign, and if they’re reading this, they are rolling their eyes (hi Casey!). So most teams either throw money at LinkedIn ABM, or they decide
Inimitable Product is the New “Make Great Content”
By 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
How Do You Market to a Double-Sided Marketplace?
By At last week’s SparkToro Office Hours, someone asked about how to incorporate audience research into a marketing strategy for a double-sided marketplace. That has lived in my head rent-free since. A double-sided marketplace, what’s that? That’s a marketplace that supports both vendors and end users. Think of TheKnot, which provides resources for people planning their
Audience Research Brief: How We’d Market to Mid-Market RevOps Leaders
By But seriously, how does audience research inform your marketing strategy? I often say audience research is the heart of it all. And in a sense, I don’t think most marketers would disagree. We use different words for it — customer insight, positioning, voice of customer, ICP development — but a lot of it comes down
Office Hours: Can You Actually Track AI Visibility?
By “Can you even track AI visibility?” That was the question behind this SparkToro Office Hours session — on March 11, 2026. Because if you’ve used ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Google AI Mode for more than five minutes, you already know the problem: ask the same question twice, and you probably won’t get the same answer
Audience Research Newsletter: How to Promote Stuff; Permissionless Co-Marketing; Instantly Get Better Content Ideas
By We’re publishing prior issues of the Audience Research Newsletter here! But we’re not just copying and pasting from the archives — we’re only surfacing what we believe is still salient today. For the newest, freshest advice on audience research and doing better marketing, subscribe here so you don’t miss new editions! We send this newsletter
Audience Research Newsletter: How to Make Content Repeatable; a Hot Take vs. a Long Take; Why Bad Guys Are… Good
By We’re publishing prior issues of the Audience Research Newsletter here! But we’re not just copying and pasting from the archives — we’re only surfacing what we believe is still salient today. For the newest, freshest advice on audience research and doing better marketing, subscribe here so you don’t miss new editions! We send this newsletter twice
The Death of the Ultimate Guide?
By For years, marketers were taught to win by publishing the most comprehensive answer. Build the “ultimate guide.” Cover every adjacent subtopic. Anticipate every follow-up question. Be the page that has everything. That advice made a lot of sense in an era when the job was largely to rank, earn the click, and keep the visitor