A new version of SparkToro, our 3rd major iteration since the product's first launch in 2020, just went live today! In this new version you'll find:

Starting today, SparkToro audience research reports now contain brand affinity data, showing the companies, products, and brand names an audience is most familiar with and/or purchases from.

I have a confession. For years, my least favorite customer question was "Does SparkToro have a public API?"

Anything AI can do... AI can do better with SparkToro.

Casey's back with a brand new invention. This time, it's estimated TAM: Total Addressable Market Size, one of the most requested features from SparkToro customers that we're thrilled to finally have in the app.

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 erred on the side of comprehensive, but the more we talk to customers and get feedback, the more we realize relevance *really* matters.

"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 the past year, SparkToro's had the remarkable ability to tell you how much your audience used Google vs. ChatGPT, Perplexity vs. Yahoo, Claude vs. Bing, and dozens of other search engines and AI tools. But... well, we're a bit embarassed to say this... that data used clickstream visitation, NOT search and prompting activity.

Until now, if you wanted to research an audience with SparkToro, you needed to choose a particular website, a search keyword, or a URL to analyze.... No more.

It's new feature month over here at SparkToro (given we've just launched Take Action and the enhanced usage-graph visuals), and we're continuing the streak with the long-requested addition of white labeled, exportable graphs.

SparkToro's data visualization just got a major upgrade, but rather than tell you about it, I'll show you:

Let me lay out the biggest challenges folks tell us they have with SparkToro in 2025:

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 TTRPG aficionados seeking D&D alternatives — and SparkToro will surface data on their behaviors and demographics. It’s a crazy cool way to go beyond keywords/sites/bio terms and uncover the audiences that matter most to your business.

Starting today, there are customizable graph visuals in almost every section of SparkToro's reports. Because why the heck should you have to be an Excel visualization expert on top of the 500 other things your boss/team/client expects of you?

Most folks who follow me know I'm a bit of a late adopter and skeptic of AI. Yes, it can do some impressive things that takes humans a long, painful amount of time to replicate. But, they're also stereotype machines whose reasoning and capabilities, especially in the creative and novel needs that marketing demands, isn't replacing even 1% of jobs (despite what my LinkedIn feed has promised each of the last 4 years).

There are tons of marketing conferences. Most follow a familiar formula: slick slide decks, broad-strokes keynotes, case studies you’ve seen before, and maybe a tote bag to take home.

Last week, we launched the latest version of SparkToro, replete with a plethora of new features and upgrades. And over the past 10 days, we've been answering a flurry of questions about the product, including one that's come up so often, it deserves its own blog post.

An overwhelming number of marketers are using AI tools to bolster their campaigns, their tactical output, and even their strategic ideas. I don't actually recommend all of those (AI can seriously mislead you on strategy, and using it to write anything you're going to publish directly is a recipe for unsubscribes), but there are some clever, high-quality marketing use-cases out there.

It's time for a new, screenshot-worthy look. It's time to deliver those key features you've been asking us for. It's time for better data, graphed over time. It's time for an all-new version of SparkToro.

Editor's Note, May 2025: We are hosting a free webinar that walks you through how to do audience research. RSVP to join us on May 29, 2025!

If you blinked in the past four months, you probably missed at least one major SparkToro release. And that's a shame, because every single one is hot like pizza supper.

There is a lot of activity moving to LLMs and generative AI tools right now, and for marketers, founders, and creators, the questions are almost always the same:

Starting today, SparkToro V2 has an entirely new capability—The Topics Section—that adds massive value for content strategy, content creation, and/or audience research applications.

For the past 9 months, our devoted CTO, Casey Henry, has been working day and night to get support for the United Kingdom and Canada into SparkToro V2. Today, it's finally here.

We recently hosted our first in-person SparkTogether event. It was a smashing success without any mishaps. I got a ton of compliments on the execution, but I got too much credit. It’s really all thanks to CKE, our event planning agency. Charlene and her team delivered on an unforgettable couple of days, and we only had two meetings leading up to the event.

It's no surprise that marketers, founders, and business owners are starting to ask how their brands can be returned in the answers given by AI/LLM tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. But it's downright shocking how difficult it is to find high-quality, accurate information about how to do this.

Here’s a confession: I’ve never really understood the whole “SEO-driven content strategy” thing.

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 we get there, let me show you how cool this final, search-centric feature is.

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.

It’s Official. On Tuesday, October 8, 2024, SparkTogether will be live, in person, in Seattle, WA for the first time. And we've already sold 120/200 tickets available. If you want one of the 80 left, I recommend grabbing one ASAP.