Similarweb blog on digital market intelligence, web traffic trends and competitive research, collected in one feed. Showing the 78 most recent of 78 articles.
Manual keyword research is slow, incomplete, and backward-looking. You start with a seed keyword, expand through a database, filter by difficulty, check competitor coverage, cluster by intent, and repeat, for every topic, every quarter, every time the content plan changes. The pr
70% of the B2B buyer journey is over before your prospect ever contacts sales. No UTM parameter captured it. No CRM field recorded it. And if your buyers are increasingly using AI tools to research vendors, that number is heading even higher. That’s the dark funnel, and if you’re
Last week, Google and Shopify announced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open-source standard that fundamentally changes how commerce works in the age of AI. UCP enables AI agents to not just recommend products, but complete entire transactions inside conversational inte
[EDITORIAL DISCLOSURE] While I serve as the SEO Director at Similarweb, this review is objective. I have ranked these tools based on “Data Provenance”. Specifically, their ability to provide unique, verified data assets that others cannot replicate. I have stress-tested every too
2025 was… a lot. Gen AI exploded. Consumer journeys got messier. Channels multiplied. And just when it felt like you understood what was working, things shifted again. If you’re planning your 2026 marketing strategy, the real challenge is building a plan grounded in reality, one
I hate to write “let’s face it”, but let’s face it: ChatGPT and other in-chat AI tools changed the way professionals ask questions, write copy, and ideate products. Many tasks that were previously performed with various tools are now done directly in ChatGPT to collect data and g
HeartWorks Weekly Digest We have a surprise! Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing. The post HeartWorks Weekly Digest We have a surprise! Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipisc appeared first on Similarweb.
For the first time, marketers can see inside the ad surfaces that AI search created. Until today, that view simply didn’t exist. Today, Similarweb has launched AI Ads, the newest channel inside Ad Intelligence. It gives you visibility into ads running inside ChatGPT, Google AI Mo
You might be ranking. That doesn’t mean anyone is clicking. More and more searches end without the person clicking on any result. Google answers the question directly on the results page, the user gets what they came for, and they move on. That’s a zero-click search, and in 2026
Optimize your homepage for AI traffic by treating it as the front door for a visitor who already knows what you do, not one who’s hearing about you for the first time. AI systems cite your deep pages, but the click almost always lands on the homepage instead, so most sites are ha
Big news: Similarweb has been named “Web Analytics Solution of the Year” in the 2026 MarTech Breakthrough Awards. It’s been a big year of change for consumers and brands, and we’re so proud that we are named the solution to help businesses navigate these changing times in the dig
This is the first edition of a series of blog posts we’ll use Similarweb’s Retail Intelligence to update twice a year – once for H1 and once for H2 2026 – tracking which of America’s biggest retailers are gaining (and losing) share across six categories that make up the bulk of U
Every few months, a new stat resets the panic clock on search marketing. This time it’s usage growth: worldwide visits to generative AI platforms hit 9.5 billion a month in May 2026, up 70% year over year, and app downloads reached 4.4 billion, up 58%. Read those two numbers on t
Ask most people which AI chatbot is “winning” and they’ll name ChatGPT without hesitation. They’re not wrong about current scale. But scale and momentum are two different questions, and 2026 usage data answers them very differently depending on which metric you’re looking at. Whi
People don’t just Google things anymore. A lot of them ask ChatGPT or use Google’s new AI mode. And now, some of those AI answers come with ads in them, like an ad popping up in the middle of a conversation. That creates two questions every marketing team should be asking right n
Keyword research assumes a query: a specific string of words with a measurable monthly search volume. AI search doesn’t work that way. When someone asks ChatGPT or Google’s AI Mode a question, the system breaks that question apart into a cluster of related sub-queries before it a
As SEOs, we encounter many cases of website keyword cannibalization. Sometimes it’s when we get a new client’s website to audit, sometimes it’s when we start working in a new role, and sometimes it’s when someone publishes a page on a website without consulting anyone. No matter
Every AI platform answer comes from somewhere. When ChatGPT tells someone how long a package usually takes to arrive, or which tool is best for managing seller returns, it’s synthesizing that answer from a specific set of sources, in response to a specific pattern of questions pe
Your YouTube channel might already be doing work you can’t see in YouTube Analytics. Picture a buyer asking ChatGPT to compare project management tools. More and more, the answer it gives doesn’t cite a blog post. It cites a YouTube demo video. Sometimes that video only has a few
You publish a well-written explainer. A competitor copies it, rewords it, and posts their own version a month later. In traditional search, you might still outrank them on domain authority and backlinks. In AI search, the model has little reason to pick either page. Both say the
A backlink is a link from another website to yours. That’s the whole definition. What makes backlinks worth an entire industry’s attention is what they signal: when a site links to you, it’s casting a small vote of confidence, and search engines (and increasingly, AI systems) rea
Ask ChatGPT a question and it might cite three sources. Ask it something similar an hour later and the sources can be completely different. That’s not a bug. It’s the process working as designed, and understanding that process is the difference between guessing at AI visibility a
Your product could be the best in its category. But if a shopper searching “protein bar with no added sugar” can’t find it in the top results on Amazon, Walmart, or Target, that quality never gets to prove itself. The digital shelf spans every product listing, search ranking, rat
AI competitive analysis is the practice of tracking how your brand performs in AI-generated answers relative to your competitors, across platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode. The tool you use to do this determines how much you can actually act on that da
Mobile products that also have a website usually end up running two organic growth efforts at once: getting found in the app store, and getting found on the web. App store optimization and search engine optimization solve those two different discovery problems, and most growth te
Not long ago, AI search was immeasurable. There was no data on how your brand appeared in an LLM answer, no way to know if you were winning or losing, and no playbook for what to do about it. Teams had theories but no proof. That’s changed today. Similarweb’s AI Search Intelligen
Search is rapidly transitioning from a discovery engine to an execution engine, and the monetization playbooks are being rewritten in real time. AI search is actively browsing the web and executing multi-step tasks on behalf of users because users are increasingly asking it to. A
TL;DR: Information gain is no longer a content quality trophy. It is the entry requirement for AI citation eligibility. A new study by On-Page.ai scored 150 pages holding top-3 positions on Google for content originality. One in four graded ‘mostly shared’: the content was semant
You open your app store dashboard, see 10,000 downloads this month and declare App Store Optimization a win. Two weeks later, retention has collapsed, keyword rankings have dropped and the marketing team is asking what happened. The download number looked great, but the ASO repor
In late 2024, most brands were still treating generative AI as a thing to watch. By January 2026, the question had shifted from whether AI search matters to how fast you are falling behind if you are not measuring it. Similarweb has been tracking this shift with three consecutive
Six weeks ago, you pulled up a prompt you track, and your brand was cited in the answer. Last week, you checked the same prompt. You weren’t there. A competitor was. Your Google rankings haven’t moved. Organic traffic looks fine. Nothing in your analytics explains it. No content
For the past year, the big question in digital marketing has been: are we showing up in AI answers? Reasonable question board level question that induces valid panic in marketing teams across the globe. But (it’s a pretty big but)… what does visibility actually give businesses? C
B2B and B2C brands are both investing in AI search visibility, but are they actually optimizing for the same thing? Rand Fishkin’s research using Similarweb’s data found that zero-click rates have reached 68%, with an overall increase of 23 pp since 2016. Then, I did a deep dive
Sometimes we need a real-life example to know something is actually possible. Not a vendor demo, not a polished case study, but someone from your world showing their work, including the parts that didn’t go as planned. That kind of inspiration, proof that it can be done, is exact
A field that barely existed three years ago now has its own conference circuit. Whether you call it GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization), or just “getting your brand to show up in ChatGPT.” It’s moved fas
Every SEO knows what a keyword ranking is. In 2026, the gap between tracking ranks and understanding visibility has never been wider. The position number is still meaningful, but it is no longer the whole story. SERP features, Sitelinks, People Also Ask, Video Boxes, and Image Pa
Prompt tracking gives you a direct line of sight into how AI engines talk about your brand. But that visibility only becomes strategically useful when you’re tracking the prompts that sit at the intersection of what your audience actually asks, where you realistically compete, an
ChatGPT’s advertising ecosystem is moving fast. Similarweb’s ChatGPT Ad tool has been tracking ads in every country where OpenAI is serving. Here is what our data shows right now. 5,171 unique advertisers, all-time +46% active advertiser growth, last 7 days ~15 average ad-firing
The 2026 FIFA World Cup is the biggest sporting event on the planet. And over the last few months, millions of fans have been doing what they always do before a major event. Searching for tickets. But here’s what’s changed. They’re not all starting on Google. Increasingly, the fi
Brand visibility and mention share tell you that AI engines know your brand exists. AI citation share tells you whether those same engines trust your content enough to cite it as evidence, to put your URL in front of a user as a verified source. Those are not the same thing, and
Here’s a scenario that will feel familiar if you run marketing for a company with a long sales cycle. A buyer lands on your site through different marketing channels. First, organically. Then directly. Then via a paid ad. Then directly again. Over 30 days, they visit eight times,
Here is a statistic that should recalibrate every assumption you have about what SEO is for in 2026: Zero-click searches, queries that end without a user clicking through to any website, now represent 68% of all Google searches, according to Similarweb’s latest data. Ten years ag
Most AEO advice is just citation advice in disguise. Fix your schema. Structure your content so AI can parse it. Write direct answers to common questions. The logic is, if AI can find your page and read it clearly, it will cite you. And citations mean visibility. The citation tra
Keyword research is foundational to SEO. It tells you where demand exists, where the opportunities are, and where you have a shot at winning. No serious SEO team skips it. In AEO, that research layer is largely missing. Until now. We just introduced Trending Topics in AI Search
Google Search Profiles are claimable, branded landing pages inside Google Search and Discover. They give publishers a direct audience follow mechanism, a dofollow link from Google’s own domain, and a strengthened entity footprint in the Knowledge Graph. On June 4, 2026, Google ga
You know which blog posts rank. You know which pages convert. What you probably don’t know: which sections of your site AI systems have explored thoroughly enough to actually recommend you, and which they’ve barely touched. That gap isn’t in GA4. It isn’t in Google Search Console
You and a colleague both ask ChatGPT the same question: the same words, at the same moment. You compare notes afterward. Different examples. Different structure. Maybe a different recommendation entirely. This is not a glitch. It is how every large language model works by design,
Server logs are the only data source that records every AI bot visit to your site in real time: no sampling, no inference, no delay. This guide explains how to extract AI bot logs from six major platforms, which fields to track across each platform, and how to use the SIGNAL work
Tracking your AI visibility is one thing. Knowing what to do about it is a completely different challenge. Most teams I talk to are sitting on dashboards full of data, brand mention rates, citation share, competitor benchmarks, and sentiment breakdowns. They know their numbers. B
AI Overviews now appear in a growing share of Google searches, and when they do, organic click-through rates drop sharply. That means the same page-optimization work you’ve always done now needs to serve two masters, Google’s traditional ranking algorithm and the AI systems that
Here is the uncomfortable truth about modern keyword research: the keyword you want to rank for may already be a lost cause before you write a single word. Not because you lack authority. Not because your content isn’t good enough. But because nearly 60% of Google searches in 202
The way businesses work is changing. Teams that used to open multiple dashboards and reports now open a single AI tool. They ask it to run the analysis instead of building it themselves, then turn that analysis into the next campaign, the next pitch, the next decision. The output
AI search is changing how consumers discover, research, and make purchasing decisions, and for marketers, the rules are being rewritten in real time. I recently hosted a webinar on this topic alongside my colleague Harel Amir, Head of Product and Business at Ad Intelligence, and
AI agent traffic grew 7,851% year-over-year in 2025, according to the HUMAN Security 2026 State of AI Traffic and Cyberthreat Benchmark Report, which analyzed more than one quadrillion interactions. As of May 2026, fewer than 5% of websites are optimized to receive it, according
A client calls. Their prospect mentioned they asked ChatGPT which accounting software their company should switch to, and your client’s brand never came up. A competitor did. Twice. That call is happening in agencies everywhere. The question it creates, “how do we get our brand i
Agentic search is an AI that does the searching for you. Not “looks something up and writes a summary” AI, which we have had for two years now, but AI that plans a research process, runs it across the live web, makes judgment calls about what it finds, and takes action on the res
As AI engines become a primary channel for brand discovery, marketers and SEO teams have rushed to measure AI visibility, how often their brand appears in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Mode answers. But visibility alone is an incomplete picture. A brand can appear in 86% of A
Generative AI is no longer just a technology trend. In 2026, it has become a measurable consumer channel, a brand discovery layer, and a new source of referral traffic. For marketers, that changes the question. It is no longer enough to ask how many people are using ChatGPT, Gemi
A potential affiliate partner looks legitimate on the surface: polished design, compelling messaging, a professional domain. Then you run their domain through Similarweb. Traffic spiked 900% in one month. Direct traffic accounts for 85% of all visits. Their top referral sources a
Robots.txt has always been a small file with big consequences. Configure it right, and search engines crawl your most important pages efficiently. Get it wrong, and critical content disappears from search results entirely. But there’s a newer dimension to this conversation. Since
If you’ve ever wondered why some sites consistently outrank you despite having similar content, website authority is usually part of the answer. Recent findings from the 2024 Search API leak suggest that Google may use internal sitewide authority signals, reinforcing what SEOs ha
Your brand is being described by AI engines thousands of times a day: A user asks an AI engine about your product or brand, or seeks alternatives to a competitor of yours. The LLM confidently answers, describing your brand, your product features, and the pros and cons vs. your co
Is AI killing website traffic or quietly becoming one of its most valuable sources? A single update on May 7th, 2026, is making marketers rethink everything. What changed on May 7th? On May 7th, 2026, ChatGPT began surfacing more prominent links to brands directly within its answ
Most marketers are running the same playbook they built in 2022. Meanwhile, three traffic channels are either growing fast or being underused by most teams: video search, online communities, and AI-referred traffic. The good news is that the fundamentals – SEO, content, paid sear
Every brand running paid search campaigns faces the same silent threat: competitors, affiliates, and rogue partners bidding on your trademarked terms and inserting your brand name into their ad copy, driving up your CPCs and redirecting clicks that were already yours. The financi
Every day, hundreds of millions of search queries are answered without a single website being visited. Users get what they need from an AI-generated response and move on. The traffic that once flowed to publishers, brands, and content marketers is staying inside the answer box. T
Most marketers instinctively know they need multiple channels. Fewer know which ones are actually driving their competitors’ growth and which ones to prioritize with a limited budget. That distinction is now harder to ignore. In 2026, the channel mix has broken into more pieces t
April 2026 was a month of competing forces on the American web. US consumers rushed to buy overseas goods before tariff escalations hit prices. Baseball returned and pulled millions of fans back to their browsers. A Middle East ceasefire cooled the news traffic that had surged in
In January, we partnered with Manus to bring Similarweb data directly into their AI agents. Within days, usage took off. Manus users started exploring competitor traffic, comparing markets, and digging into channel performance, all from a single conversation. As people got comfor
April 2026 was a month of clear winners and clear losers across the top 100 most-visited websites worldwide. Most major platforms declined. A handful grew sharply, and the reasons behind each move are specific: a cricket tournament, a TV premiere, a product launch, a trust surge.
In 2026, Google search behavior is being shaped by three major forces: live sports, everyday utility, and platform-driven discovery. Across the global and trending lists, sports dominate the search landscape. The IPL is the standout story, ranking as the top global and top trendi
Showing up in AI answers and winning in AI answers are not the same thing, most brands don’t know the difference, and their dashboards aren’t telling them. I ran an AI Brand Visibility campaign for Lululemon in Similarweb and found that the brand’s visibility looked strong on pap
Your GSC performance report tells you what people typed into Google last week. It tells you nothing about what they asked ChatGPT this morning. For most brands, those are two different lists. The average ChatGPT prompt runs about 60 words; the average Google search runs 3.4, acco
The purchase funnel now starts in an AI chat window rather than a search bar. According to Similarweb’s AI Brand Visibility Index, AI platform visits grew 28.6% between January 2025 and January 2026 in the US alone, and ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are retaining that attention
B2B sales techniques are methods salespeople use to nurture leads and convert them into paying customers. Sales techniques are the “how” that enable sales teams to achieve their goals of closing more deals and increasing revenue. They include proven, practiced tactics for engagin
The gap between average and top-performing salespeople has never been wider. Research consistently shows that the best sellers in 2026 work smarter by adapting faster and thinking differently about buyer engagement. But what specific behaviors create this performance gap? Most of
Picture this: you’ve spent three weeks researching a prospect, building a custom deck, and rehearsing your pitch. You get 12 minutes on the call before the VP interrupts with “We’re already working with [competitor]” and the meeting ends. Your carefully crafted pitch never made i
TL;DR Sales funnel optimization is the practice of systematically improving conversion rates at each stage of the B2B buyer journey, from first awareness to closed deal. In 2026, that requires moving beyond generic best practices. The highest-impact tactics combine digital intell