Rand Fishkin's Recent LinkedIn Posts

I'm really worried that marketers are getting bamboozled by all the "AI Citation Research." We see things like "Reddit dropped from 8% to 3% of citations in AI answers," and think that Reddit posts must therefore have less influence on the brands ChatGPT, Claude, or Google present in their responses... But that's not true! Citations are correlated, sure, but not causal, to which brands appear in AI answers (and that's further complicated by RAG vs. base model). I know all this sounds complex, but I did my best to break it down in the latest #5MinuteWhiteboard 👇 p.s. Lily Ray points out that in some cases of RAG where information is very recently updated and/or quite limited, the response will pull exclusively and causally from the citations.

Funny story - the folks at Viasat asked me to join travel host Samantha Brown for a podcast in the World Trade Center in NYC... and they made a large, incredibly kind donation to GiveDirectly as well. The interview just went live on YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gsz2X_bn and honestly, they did a lovely job with it. Such a fun experience 🥰😎

Google search traffic referrals to big publishers are down 47% over the last 3 years. Talk about ZERO-Click Search; oy vey! Full study: https://lnkd.in/gRbxM3Py Shahzad Abbas over at Define Media Group, Inc. put together an excellent look at the large media properties they advise, and showed how traffic patterns are changing. Spoiler: in January, Google Discover sent more traffic than Google Search.

Two big changes in marketing thanks to the new world of Zero Click Everything: 1) SEO is about influencing people in their search results, not getting clicks and traffic. 2) CRO is about optimizing brand perception and purchase decisions BEFORE customers ever reach your website. Had a great chat with Slobodan Manić on the No Hacks podcast 👇

Me 6 weeks ago: "Synthetic prompts seem like a sketchy, incomplete way to get real insight into people's AI behaviors and prompt responses." Me after our AI Inconsistency research: "OK... I was wrong. Synthetic prompts work pretty darn well so long as you know the audience." Also me: "Wait a minute... could we put AI prompt topics & examples into SparkToro?" Casey Henry: "Yup. Here you go." Our latest feature -- AI prompt topics and examples your audience uses in Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Claude -- is now live 😎👇

NEW research: https://lnkd.in/gY7nVmC4 Search happens everywhere. Not just Google, ChatGPT, and Bing. Our latest project with Datos, A Semrush Company analyzed search on 41 major websites via their desktop panel and found that if you broaden the definition of search, Google is 73%, not 90%+. And ChatGPT is 3.2%, well behind several players rarely mentioned in the conversation. And, if billions of searches are taking place on dozens of sites, not just "traditional" and "AI tools," maybe SEO should be bigger than those two categories as well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

AI responses aren't lies; they're rarely dead wrong. But they're also nowhere near consistent. If you're using Google AI, ChatGPT, or Claude to get lists of recommendations (products, brands, etc.), or if you're trying to track if your own brand/product/entity in their responses, please arm yourself with this knowledge first. Yesterday I published a heap of charts, graphs, dataviz, and stats... but for some people those don't land. So I made a short video attempting to sum up the painstaking AI consistency research that went near-viral after yesterday's launch (30K views in the first 24hrs!). Thanks to everyone who helped share it, and 🤞 this will help even more to wrap their heads around it 👇

Datos: ChatGPT is ~3% of desktop web search SimilarWeb: ChatGPT is ~3% of desktop + mobile search New report (that went viral on LinkedIn): ChatGPT is A WHOPPING 20%+ of search! There's no honor in assuming you're right and they're wrong without investigation. So... I investigated 🕵️‍♀️👇 p.s. Simon Kemp noted below that I made an error in my video - using the US mobile app numbers rather than global ones from Similarweb. The other inaccuracies pointed out still stand, but this was a mistake on my part and I apologize.

97% of visitors to Google perform a search 56% of visitors to ChatGPT enter a prompt And only 35% of visitors to Yahoo perform a search Using this research (from last week's report), we made some updates to SparkToro's platform on which search & AI tools your audience uses; it's live now 👇

Where does influence happen? EVERYWHERE. I took Similarweb's top 100 sites, categorized each one, applied traffic share based on the # of Dec. 2025 visits, and voila! A breakdown of where people go on the web... It's not just search. It's barely AI. And if you're not present in the places *your* audience pays attention, it's all over, because the discovery, research, and comparison processes are happening in the platforms, not on your carefully curated resource pages. Welcome to the Zero-Click Web.

Five topics Luke Szkudlarek and I covered on his 'Fixing the Game' podcast: 1) The reality behind zero-click search (and why it’s not new at all) 2) How AI isn't changing marketing — yup, unlike every other post in your feed, I said "IS NOT" 😅 3) Why traffic is a vanity metric and brand matters more than ever (bad news for classic SEO types) 4) Why “great content” alone no longer works (maybe it never really did?) 5) Why you should focus on *what* *your* *audience* *does* instead of whichever trend is getting all the hype (VR? Metaverse? Blockchain? NFTs? Internet of Things? Just saying...)