Category: Data

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…
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…
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 hosted a webinar to walk through the findings of this study. You can watch it for free (no ads). 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 this new version of search analytics…
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…
Agencies Data Industry Marketing Research

The 2025 State of Digital Agencies: it’s still rough out there, but slowly improving; and is AI really a threat?

Paddy MooganBy Paddy Moogan
Introduction from Rand: I care deeply about the consulting world in digital marketing. These people are my friends, my colleagues, my fellow speakers, and my investors. Their fears, concerns, successes, and trends are bellwethers for our field as a whole. Is AI hurting or helping marketers? Is the Zero Click costing them clients or gaining them new ones? Are agencies’…
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…
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…

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