Data Studies
Studies on how Google ranks, displays and indexes pages: title and meta description rewrites, ranking churn, search features, schema markup, backlinks and on-page basics. The data comes from Google US search results on desktop and mobile, the websites behind US Google Business Profiles across dozens of industries, homepage code and Google Lighthouse results from the public HTTP Archive crawl, site popularity from Google's Chrome UX Report, and backlink records for small business websites. Each study lists its sample and method, so you can judge how far the findings apply to your own site.
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66.7% of website homepages fail at least one of the basic SEO checks in Google's free Lighthouse test, and even the 1,000 most visited sites fail 61% of the time. The most common failure is also one of the easiest to fix: a missing meta description.
30.8% of website homepages have no meta description, the short summary Google can show under a link in search results. Among the 1,000 most visited websites the rate is 15.1%, half as often, and the drop appears only at the very top of the web.
32.7% of website homepages with images have at least one image with no alt text, the written description that screen readers read aloud and search engines use to understand a picture. Across the web, 11.1% of homepage images have no alt text at all, and another 27.6% have an empty one.
18.3% of the canonical tags on the homepages of the 500,000 most visited websites point Google to a different URL, telling it that another page is the main version of the homepage. 7.1% point to a different website altogether, and 46.7% of these homepages have no canonical tag at all.
Only 50.9% of the homepages of the 10,000 most visited websites carry schema markup, the code that tells search engines and AI systems what a page is about, against 55.7% across all websites. And the types that describe a business in detail are rare: LocalBusiness markup appears on 5.2% of homepages.
23.5% of the homepage title tags of the 500,000 most visited websites run past 60 characters, the point where Google usually cuts a title off. At the other extreme, 38.3% are under 30 characters, too short to say much more than a brand name.
39.5% of small business websites have at least two pages with near-identical content within their first 20 pages, pages so similar that Google may treat them as copies. Among fashion store websites the rate reaches 78.2%.
16.1% of the pages on small business websites carry a signal that keeps them out of Google's index, so they cannot show up in search at all. One small business website in 15 hides half or more of its pages this way.
42.6% of pages on small business websites have fewer than 300 words of text, and one small business website in six has no page that reaches 300 words at all.
49.6% of homepages either have no H1, the main heading that tells visitors and search engines what a page is about, or have several competing ones. 31.2% of homepages have no main heading at all, 4.8 million websites.
Within a year, 60.4% of the pages in Google's top 10 results for a search have dropped off page one, and not one of 2,692 searches kept the same ten results. Over any six to seven weeks, 35.7% of page one changes.
The page Google ranks first for a search changes on average once every 208 days, and 42.5% of keywords kept the same number one result for at least six months. Roofing searches get a new leader every 127 days, two and a half times as often as senior care searches.
74.8% of the pages ranking in Google's top 10 that show a publish or update date were published or updated in the last 12 months, and the median one was 113 days old. The first result is the freshest on the page, yet Google shows a date in its search listing only 8.6% of the time.
The median page ranking first on Google has 759 words, fewer than any position from 2 to 9 and below the 921-word median across the whole top 10. Longer pages do not win the top spot; pages that answer the search do.
15.1% of followed backlinks to small business websites, the links that pass ranking value, have disappeared, against 3% of nofollow links, five times the rate. Overall, 9.8% of new backlinks are gone within a year of appearing.
100% of the backlinks Yellow Pages, DexKnows, Superpages and LocalityBiz send to small business websites are nofollow, so none pass ranking credit, against 2.8% of links from blogs. Overall, 25.3% of backlinks to small business websites are nofollow.
88% of small business websites have at least one backlink from a page scored as likely spam, and on the average small business website 25.2% of backlinks are spammy. One single spam domain links to 204 of 249 small business websites, and two gambling phrases rank among the 15 most common link texts pointing at ordinary local businesses.
Google's featured snippet, the boxed answer quoted from one website at the top of the results, appears on 0.1% of desktop searches: 11 of 20,000. An AI Overview appears on 57.6% of the same searches.
Google shows a People Also Ask box, the list of related questions that expand into short answers from websites, on 88.2% of desktop searches and 88.1% of mobile searches. For roofing searches the rate is 98%.
A Reddit thread ranks in Google's top 10 results for 49.8% of software searches, half of them, against 20.5% of searches across 24 industries. For real estate searches the rate is 3%.
Google's Discussions and forums box, the box of threads from Reddit, Quora and niche forums, appears on 3.4% of desktop searches, about one in 30. Forum content reaches page one far more often through ordinary rankings: Reddit alone ranks in the top 10 on 20.5% of the same searches.
Out of 35,679 websites that rank on Google's first page, the 100 that appear most often hold 37% of all top 10 spots. In real estate searches, those 100 websites hold 68.3%.
72.7% of the pages ranking first on Google do not contain every word of the search in their web address, and 85.3% do not use the keyword as a clean URL slug. The top result is no more likely to have it than the results at positions 2 to 6.
78.2% of the pages ranking first on Google do not show the exact search phrase in the title Google displays, and 68.2% do not contain all its words in any order. The first result uses the exact phrase only slightly more often than positions 2 to 6.
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