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…
Product SEO SparkToro

NEW: Ranking Pages Shows the Content Your Audience is Most Likely to Find in Search Results

Great news—the last of our three, search-focused features in SparkToro V2 has finally launched. It’s called Ranking Pages and you can now find it in the keywords section of every SparkToro report. Our next few features will focus on expanding V2’s coverage to the UK and Canada, and providing data about the ad platforms that reach an audience. But, before…
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…
5-Minute Whiteboards SEO

The Google API Leak Should Change How Marketers and Publishers Do SEO

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. Recently, my good friend Wil Reynolds wrote a LinkedIn post questioning…
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…

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

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

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…