Category: Predictions

5-Minute Whiteboards Advertising Data Industry Marketing Predictions

Is Google Losing Search Market Share?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
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…
5-Minute Whiteboards Data Marketing Predictions SEO Tactics

How to Fight Back Against a Traffic-Less Web

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
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

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
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…
5-Minute Whiteboards Marketing Predictions SEO

How to Future-Proof Your Marketing for an AI-Centric Search World? | 5-Minute Whiteboard

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Today, Google’s search results still look (mostly) like lists of snippets and links, e.g. But, plenty of search marketers and industry observers suspect we’re in the closing days of this format, and the future holds something closer to how AI-tools like ChatGPT and Bard answer user-inputted prompts, e.g. If that’s the case, what can/should marketers do to give themselves a…
5-Minute Whiteboards Marketing Predictions SEO

5-Minute Whiteboard: Is Generative AI in Search Results the SEO Apocalypse?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
In the not-too-distant future, we’ll look back at the days when a full 1/3rd of Google searches resulted in a free click to the open web and marvel at how good we had it. For the last few months, Google’s been telegraphing that generative AI answers will soon appear in search results. These pieces of content will be drawn from…
Data Industry Marketing Predictions

AI-Generated Content is the New Floor

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Anyone can make it. Most of it is at least OK. Some of it’s pretty good. A few folks are already sharpening their skills at prompting AIs to generate increasingly high-quality material. But, the core problem with content created by large language model (LLM) outputs is that it’s so cheap, so accessible, so ubiquitous—it’s not merely table stakes; AI content…
Industry Marketing Predictions Tactics

Why Marketers Should Follow Their Audiences, Not Predict the Future

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
It’s 2017, and you convince your executives to be early adopters of the #Web3 trend. Blockchain-based product investments, marketing with NFTs, perhaps your own crypto coin. It’s fun, interesting, and it feels like you’re ahead of your competition on a rising tide that will lift all ships. Only trouble is, your target audience—the people you hope will become customers—aren’t adopting…
Industry Marketing Predictions Tactics

Why Marketers, Creators, and Brands Should Start Using Mastodon ASAP

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
I joined Twitter in June, 2007. It turned out to be a very smart move; over the next decade, that network had a massive impact on my professional success. Some of that is because I did interesting or valuable things, but a lot of it was a combination of timing and serendipity. There are plenty of articles about why you…
Events Industry Marketing Predictions Psychology Startups

Google, Apple, and Amazon Stifle Innovation When They Favor Their Own Products

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
The SparkToro team got an exciting surprise on Sunday evening: a mention of our research on Last Week Tonight by John Oliver. The full episode, Big Tech Monopolies, is available on YouTube. It covers an issue I’ve railed against before, but with a heightened sense of urgency: there is actually a bipartisan bill in Congress that might fix this. Thankfully,…
Marketing Predictions

Inferred Links Will Replace the Link Graph

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
For 25 years, links have been core to how Google ranks web pages. But, today, I think most marketers dramatically overestimate their importance. There’s good evidence that over the long run, links won’t be all that crucial to Google’s rankings, and will be replaced by lexical references that connect topics and keywords to a brand, website, or page—what I’ll call…

Keep up with SparkToro®