Rand Fishkin

Founder/Wizard of Moz

SparkToro CEO. Author of Lost & Founder. Feminist. I love underdogs, cooking, & helping people do better marketing

In 2018, I started SparkToro, software that makes audience research accessible to everyone. I'm also cofounder of indie game maker, Snackbar Studio, author of Lost and Founder: (2018), prev founded & led Moz (2001-17) and am a frequent keynote speaker on marketing and entrepreneurship. But, I'm probably best known as the amateur chef husband of renowned author, Geraldine DeRuiter.

Cofounder & CEO

I co-founded SparkToro (with Casey Henry) to enable high quality audience research for marketers, PR folks, entrepreneurs, and product builders without the need for expensive, time-consuming, inaccurate surveys or impossible-to-scale manual research.

I'm calling it. Britney Muller's post here yesterday is the most important short piece on AI you'll read this year. Why? 👇👇👇

Cofounder of SparkToro, Alertmouse, & Snackbar Studio. Author of Lost & Founder. Feminist. I love underdogs, cooking, & helping people do better marketing

In my humble opinion, this is the most useful new Google feature I've seen in years. Gemini? AI mode? Short videos? Advanced shopping features? All of 'em pale in comparison to this treasure of a time-saver.

Guess what I'm gonna be using a lot more of in my posts... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Open up your email.
Search "your november search performance for"

Compare this year to the last few and you'll see just how obvious the zero click trend is. E.G. our impressions have doubled while clicks fell by more than half. And yet, revenue is more 10X what it was 5 years ago. Was search traffic always a vanity metric? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 😏

The marketing "funnel" isn't dead, at least not from the perspective of site owners seeking an analogy of the business-side experience. BUT... if you're seeking analogies for buyer behavior, the funnel really doesn't work anymore.

IMO it's more like a pinball machine. Potential buyers bounce between sources of influence, researching, observing, asking, searching, and browsing before, after, and during the decision-making process. This week's new #5minutewhiteboard breaks down how this works (and hopefully convinces your boss/team/client to stop thinking of buyer journeys as linear, funnel-like processes) 👇

Sent this email to SparkToro subscribers this morning and received ***the most*** replies to an email we've had all year.

My takeaway: NOT sounding like an AI is a linguistic superpower.

Some great analysis from the AHrefs team deserves more attention -- because it shows you how to spam, er... authentic-mention-build your way to visibility in the zero click marketing platform that is ChatGPT.

Respect to Glen Allsopp for this banger of a research piece 👇

If you somehow missed our joint report with Datos, A Semrush Company from 2 weeks ago:
 - AI tools continue to grow
 - But they're not taking market share from traditional search
 - Zero-click searches continue to rise (based on this + the recent Pew study, I suspect we're now >2/3rds of Google searches ending without a click)
 - Gemini and ChatGPT appear to be the breakout winners in AI. The other LLMs' growth has stalled.
 - The EU continues to adopt AI faster than the US (still surprises me!)
Full report link below 👇

Even Seth has noticed that Zero-Click Marketing is the only way to recapture the losses brought on by the death of web traffic👇

21 bestsellers, founding editor of the Carbon Almanac, blogger and entrepreneur.

Interesting algorithmic data point: My blog post traffic on Linkedin (which point back to my blog, automatically posted every morning) is down 90% from a few years ago. But when I write a short post directly here, we're back to large numbers.

You can see how easy it is to get sucked into doing what the algorithm wants, instead of what works best for my work. Building and maintaining content on a platform we don't own is a risky trap.

Don't check into a motel where it's hard to check out.

[Update! Thanks everyone for your thoughts on this. Tomorrow I'm going to test a new format for my blog, using a Zap to bring it in without a link.]

NEW post: https://lnkd.in/g8frZZfR I'm honored to have the incredibly talented, deeply kind, shockingly on-top-of-everything Kristy Morrison as my Chief of Staff, and this post (which should have been up weeks ago when she came aboard) breaks down much of what she's been up to.

Kristy's doing this part-time, but to me it *feels* like she's always there when I/we need her. Please join me in welcoming her to the SparkToro, Snackbar Studio, and Alertmouse teams 💗💗💗

Are digital agencies suffering from a decline in marketing spend?
How are they perceiving AI -- a threat? Opportunity? Something else?
Are lead times on contract closes getting longer? (spoiler: yup)

Answers to these and dozens more questions agency owners have about their business, revenue, margins, and opinions compare to the rest of the field are now available on SparkToro's blog thanks to the tireless efforts of Paddy Moogan and his work with agency owners at Founder Focus. Don't miss it 👇

NEW: Graphs & data visualization on usage of AI Tools and Social Networks

If you've wondered "how much does my audience use ChatGPT vs. Deepseek vs. Gemini and how much more or less is that than Google, Yahoo, and Bing?" SparkToro now has the answer in a quick, easy-to-read, easy-to-customize graph. This feature is now live for everyone, and should make these dataviz sections WAY MORE CLEAR. 👇

SparkToro

NEW post - https://lnkd.in/g9mxMCt3

This week's #5MinuteWhiteboard is a follow-up to last week's exploration of how the clean, funnel-shaped buyer journey of years past no longer exist (and today that journey looks more like a pinball machine). It's not just the shape of the buyer journey that's changed, though, it's all these new problems -- 7 new problems -- that we face as a result. Details in the video 📽

I love the Alertmouse design 😍

And I owe a shoutout to Leonie Wharton, our brand designer (who created our logo, brand colors, the delightful, detectorist mouse mascot, and more), and to the superb web design team at Fan Club Brands (who really nailed the website). If you're in the market for folks who do this type of work, I recommend both wholeheartedly -- easy to work with, kind, responsive, and high-quality.

Alertmouse

Freelance Designer & Illustrator

Fan Club Brands

This 👉https://lnkd.in/gs39KYAR is why I'm sleeping outside in the cold tonight. And if you've ever heard the stories of what young people who've lost their homes because they're LGBTQ, or in danger of violence, or being trafficked, or because their families lose their own homes go through, you'll know how important this cause is.

Geraldine and I are proud to have contributed to this event for more than a decade financially, and now, in person too. I hate being cold, I love sleeping and I'm a terrible sleeper, but none of that matters tonight because this cause is worth it.

"Can't someone else do it?"

We talk to a lot of digital marketers, and hear about the same process over and over:
 - Run a report
 - Export
 - Upload to ChatGPT
 - Prompt engineer over and over until you get something good
 - Combine prompt + report data
 - Get something useful

Someone else should do that for you. Someone named SparkToro 😎

Least surprising assertion ever: YOUR logo > OUR logo.

So, starting today (b/c Casey's on fire with new features this week) you can throw YOUR logo on those pretty, customizable audience research graphs in SparkToro in ~10 seconds 👇

"What soap washes its mouth out with."
"When you want to unfriend someone... in person."
"These pants aren’t going to $#@% themselves."

Those are three actual taglines from one of this year's Best Damn Food & Drink Gift Guide recommended products. I dare you not to click through and find out more. Heck, I DOUBLE DARE you: https://lnkd.in/gfUCzJSV

p.s. Happy holidays and happy gifting!! 🎄🕎🥰🤗

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.css-6ytdur{background-image:linear-gradient(284deg, rgba(39, 43, 72, 1) 0%, rgba(33, 47, 183, 1) 100%);color:transparent;-webkit-background-clip:text;background-clip:text;}Rand Fishkin's Linkedin Analytics

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Rand Fishkin's Linkedin Analytics

Performance ScoreRand Fishkin's LinkedIn Performance

Rand Fishkin's Best Posts (last 30 days)