Data Industry Marketing Research SEO

New Research: We analyzed 332 million queries over 21 months to uncover never-before-published data on how people use Google

Google is a massive presence on the modern web. They’ve held 90%+ of the global search market share for 15 years. Even the rise of AI tools has been unable to budge that number (so far). They get <9% of all web visits, but send more than 60% of all referring traffic to other sites. Google is certainly one of…

Is Google Losing Search Market Share?

A recent Wall Street Journal made the top of feeds in the digital marketing world, claiming that Google is on the precipice of losing the lead in the search advertising wars. Supposedly, in 2025, for the first time, Google may fall under 50% of market share in search advertising (according to an eMarketer report the WSJ cites). The WSJ points…

How to Fight Back Against a Traffic-Less Web

Surveys, studies, analytics… they all show the same thing: getting traffic on the web is harder than ever and it’s getting worse much faster in the last 2 years than the decade before. Site owners are faced with two options: compete for the scraps Google and the other platforms provide, or play the game differently by engaging in Zero-Click answers,…
Data Industry Predictions SEO

New Research: So Far, AI is Not Disrupting Search or Making a Dent in Google

The good folks at Sonata Insights recently analyzed Datos‘ clickstream panel to uncover consumer search behavior insights in the “age of AI”. If you’re in the digital marketing world, it’s probably worth your time to download and read. Last Friday, I got access to the report and asked Datos for permission to share a few of the big findings and…
Data Industry SEO

2024 Zero-Click Search Study: For every 1,000 EU Google Searches, only 374 clicks go to the Open Web. In the US, it’s 360.

Over the past decade, I’ve done several reports with multiple clickstream panels analyzing Google search behavior at scale. The last such analysis was in 2021, and behavior almost certainly looks different today thanks to changes from both Google itself and its search consumers. In past reports, I’ve only been able to look at searches for the United States. This time,…
Data Product SEO SparkToro

NEW: SERP Features are now in SparkToro V2 to help you see what types of results Google shows your audience

As I promised last week, when we launched Search Modifiers in V2, SparkToro has a whole bunch of new product updates to release. The second of these arrives today: SERP Features. What is it? SERP Features aggregates all the keywords your audience searches for in Google, extracts the most common types of results Google shows, and provides the frequency (and…
Data Product SparkToro

NEW: Search Modifiers in SparkToro V2 Make It Easy to Analyze Your Audience’s Search Intent

We’ve got a whole slew of new features coming to SparkToro V2, the first of which launches today. What is it: Search Modifiers is a new tab in the Keywords section that aggregates all of the terms and phrases found in Google’s search “chips” (also called “topic filters” for a given query. The data is provided alongside a measure of…
Data Industry SEO

An Anonymous Source Shared Thousands of Leaked Google Search API Documents with Me; Everyone in SEO Should See Them

Update: We are diving deep into the Google API leak and what it means for marketers in our next episode of SparkToro Office Hours on June 27. Join Michael King, Founder & CEO, iPullRank, and Rand Fishkin, Co-founder & CEO, SparkToro, to learn more. RSVP for the free webinar. On Sunday, May 5th, I received an email from a person…

Where Web Users Spend Time vs. Where Traffic Referrals Originate

“Most of our site’s traffic comes from Google, so most of our digital marketing efforts and spending should be on Google, too.” – An absolutely terrible way to invest in marketing On Monday of this week, I published a comprehensive look at how traffic flows on the American web. Unfortunately, some folks in the social feeds where this research was…