The top 10,000 query terms drove 46% of all searches, and 148 of those made up nearly 15% of total volume for queries with at least 100 searches during a 21-month period when the data was studied, according to findings released early this week. This is data that is important to know when planning to buy media and run ad campaigns.
The terms included YouTube, Gmail, Amazon, Facebook, ChatGPT, Google Translate, WhatsApp Web, Google Maps, Pornhub, Google Docs, Instagram, Weather, Netflix, Speed Text, and Calculator.
These "primarily-navigational queries" are searched on dozens of times a month.
Some 44.19% of searches are for brands, while the remaining 55.82 are for generic searches, according to data released early this week.
In September 2024, the 612,981 single-search keywords -- very long-tail, according to SparkToro Founder Rand Fishkin -- were nearly double the volume of all searches with 2 to 10 queries making up 2.2% of total search volume. Of the 1.05 million query terms run by his 130,000-device panel, 59% had only one search.
The findings -- compiled by Fishkin with data from Datos, a Semrush company -- show that the top 100 queries had more than 155,000 searches with data that ran between January 2023 and August 2024.
"A few thousand query terms make up a quarter of all Google searches, and that looks to be rising over time," he wrote in his most recent research.
Fishkin attempted to answer questions such as what percentage of all Google searches are brands versus generic terms, navigational, commercial, informational, and more.
He found that 51% of searches were informational, while 33% were navigational, 14.5% were commercial, and 0.69% were transactional.
In research that ran early this year, he found that Google sends more than 60% of all referring traffic to other sites, 85% of Americans use the Internet daily, and the average U.S. Internet user spends just under 7 hours online per day.
One of the most interesting insights, Fishkin wrote, is that "Google has become a place people go *after* [someone discovers] a need rather than a demand-creation or even demand-nudging platform," and that scrolling through "hundreds of thousands of searches will give you the distinct impression that search is what people do after they realize a need rather than a place they discover brands and services to investigate." This is a major change from the earliest days of Google.
When it comes to categories, actors, movies, television shows, musical artists, and video games are much larger than Fishkin expected, and it solves his question as to why Google would put so much "energy into creating portal-like experiences for these queries," with one quarter percent of Google's traffic in entertainment-focused topics.
He also provided insight as to how much of Google's search volume is monetizable beyond low-paying display and retargeting ads -- likely between 60% and 70%, he wrote. Some 30% of Google's searches have low commercial value, aside from CPM ads.