2 builders who never spoke to each other

Optimise every surface people type a query into

Search is not one box. Amazon, Bing and YouTube each carried more desktop search activity than ChatGPT in the panel data, commerce sites take about a tenth of all searches and social networks another twentieth, and the sites outside the top seven grew their share through the year. Keep the acronym your market knows and widen what it covers rather than chasing a new one.

The method

1. 01

   Define your discipline as influencing the audience wherever they look for information on your topic, so the definition survives whichever platform wins.

2. 02

   Keep the acronym your market already knows and widen what it stands for, rather than launching a new one nobody can say.

3. 03

   Treat searching as something people do everywhere they can type a query, and buy visibility across all of those surfaces rather than two of them.

4. 04

   Do not assume people use a platform's own search to find things on that platform.

5. 05

   Never use visits to a tool as a proxy for use of that tool, because half the visitors to some platforms never run a query at all.

What it returned

• 15

  Ashley Liddell of Deviation coined Search Everywhere Optimisation and it was picked up by Nikki Lam, who heads search at NP Digital; Rand Fishkin counted 15 rival acronyms on LinkedIn in a single day and offers his own SOCEngine and SEOmoz as proof he is bad at naming but can spot a dead end.

• 41

  Across 41 domains on Datos' US desktop panel in Q4 2025, about 80 percent of searches happened on traditional engines, roughly 10 percent on commerce sites, about 5.5 percent on social networks and 3.2 percent on AI tools; 23 of the 41 cleared 0.1 percent share, which Rand Fishkin scales to over 5 billion searches for the year.

• Rand Fishkin points out practitioners are already fielding questions about ranking inside YouTube, breaking into Reddit, surfacing in Pinterest search and being visible to the language models, which is the wider job under the old label.

• Rand Fishkin was surprised to find LinkedIn among the lowest for searches per searcher despite obvious demand, and guesses that both it and Reddit sit low because Google searches those sites better than their own site search does.

Sources

• Ten SaaS marketing principles for 2024Justin Jackson · justinjackson.ca · 3. Have a strong presence on search engines. · undated
• Seriously, please stop with the new acronyms. It's still SEO: Search Everywhere Optimization. - SparkToroRand Fishkin · sparktoro.com · undated
• New Research: Search Happens Everywhere; an Analysis of 41 Websites with Significant Search Activity - SparkToroRand Fishkin · sparktoro.com · My Conclusions from this Report · undated