Every figure on this page is sourced. If we're not certain of a number, we don't publish it.
Load time has a direct relationship with whether people stay or leave. These figures come from Google's own research.
Core Web Vitals are Google's standardised set of performance metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (how fast the main content loads), Interaction to Next Paint (how quickly the page responds to clicks), and Cumulative Layout Shift (how much the page jumps around during load). Poor scores on any of these can affect your ranking.
Understanding the size of Google's search operation helps explain why optimising for it matters.
Google's near-total dominance of global search means that optimising for other search engines is a distant second priority for most small businesses in the UK and Europe. Bing holds a small share; DuckDuckGo and others are a fraction of that. For practical purposes, Google is search.
Mobile has overtaken desktop for web traffic globally. A site that works poorly on mobile is failing the majority of its visitors.
Mobile-first indexing means Google predominantly crawls and indexes the mobile version of your site. If your mobile experience is stripped down or broken, that is what Google sees and ranks. A desktop-only design is no longer sufficient.
AI tools have grown faster than almost any consumer technology in history. Their integration into search is already underway.
AI Overviews appear above traditional organic results for a growing range of queries. When Google's AI summarises an answer, the user may not click through to any website. This shift affects traffic patterns and makes it more important for your site to be structured clearly so Google's systems can understand and cite it accurately. This is the core of what ASEO addresses.
For businesses serving a specific area, local search signals matter more than broad domain authority.
A complete, accurate Google Business Profile is the single highest-leverage action for most local businesses with no web presence. It takes about 30 minutes to set up and is free. Pairing it with a well-structured website and local schema markup gives Google everything it needs to surface your business for relevant local queries.
This page only includes statistics we're confident are from primary or reputable secondary sources. SEO is full of made-up numbers: percentages that originated in one vendor's blog post and got copy-pasted across the internet until they became "common knowledge". We don't publish those.
Where a figure is dated, we've noted it. Some statistics change quickly (AI adoption figures especially). If you're using any of these in a business case, it's worth checking the original source for the most current data.
See how your own site performs
The free grader runs your site through Google's own PageSpeed API. Real data, no estimates.