Category: SEO

5-Minute Whiteboards SEO Zero Click

5 Strategic Features that Predict Survival in the Zero-Click Era

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
No amount of tactical excellence can save you. That’s the lesson in the zero-click era — you can be the best meme-maker on social, the greatest editor in short-form video, the best keyword researcher the SEO world has ever known… it won’t matter. If your website and business model are things Google and AI can disintermediate, they will. This is…
Product SEO SparkToro

NEW Upgraded Keyword Data in SparkToro’s Audience Research Reports

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
One of the challenges we face at SparkToro is deciding between comprehensiveness vs. relevance in the audience data we deliver. In a nutshell, it’s the difference between knowing all the behaviors an audience might have (including the weird, random affinities, strange correlations, and surprising overlaps) vs. the ones that are most useful and compelling to a marketing campaign. Historically, we’ve…
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…
5-Minute Whiteboards AI/LLMs Content Marketing SEO Tactics

We’ve Learned More About How to Appear in AI Answers

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Thanks to some recent experiments and research in the marketing world (and an unfortunate, manipulative attack by a Reddit mod), we’ve learned a lot more about how to influence the answers AI tools provide. This is particularly relevant for those seeking to have their brand names (or websites) appear when ChatGPT, CoPilot, Claude, Gemini, or others are asked for “the…
Industry Marketing Psychology SEO Tactics

Seriously, please stop with the new acronyms. It’s still SEO: Search Everywhere Optimization.

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
It’s a day ending in Y, which means my social feeds are filled with people attempting to rebrand the acronym “SEO.” Look, I ain’t here to rain on your parade, so if you love calling it AIO or GEO or EIEIO, be my guest. I haven’t been an SEO for more than seven years, despite what all the “top SEO…
Data Marketing Research SEO

New Research: Google Search Grew 20%+ in 2024; receives ~373X more searches than ChatGPT

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
For years, two questions have dominated both marketers’ interest and the media’s coverage of Google Search: Are AI Tools taking market share away from Google? Is Google search growing, flatlining, or declining? I’ve seen wild speculation that Google’s market share is down 5-10% since ChatGPT’s launch, and heard anecdotes across my feeds from people claiming that they never use Google…
Data Research SEO

New Research: How Often Do Americans Search Google? Which Search Verticals Do They Use?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Last quarter, we published an extraordinary analysis of hundreds of millions of Google searches alongside our clickstream panel partners at Datos (A Semrush Company). That analysis opened many marketers and creators’ eyes to the reality of how people use Google in 2024, i.e. navigational-heavy, and significantly weighted toward the top few thousand queries. This quarter, we’re back to examine several…
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

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
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…
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,…

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