A 90-minute audit across eight platforms will show you exactly where your brand is visible, invisible, and losing to competitors in the places buyers actually search.
SparkToro and Datos just published research analyzing search behavior across 41 major websites. The headline number: Google accounted for roughly 74% of desktop searches in Q4 2025 when you include search activity on platforms like Amazon, YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn. That’s a very different picture from the 90%+ share that gets cited in most industry reporting.
The finding isn’t surprising if you’ve been paying attention. People search everywhere. They search YouTube for how-to content. They search Reddit for honest product opinions. They search LinkedIn for people and companies. They ask ChatGPT to compare tools. None of this is new behaviour. What’s new is having data that quantifies it.
But here’s what struck me about the reaction to this research: most B2B marketing teams have no idea what their brand looks like on any of these platforms. They track Google rankings religiously. They might glance at ChatGPT once in a while, or have AI visibility dashboards set up. Everything else is a blind spot.
That’s fixable in an afternoon.
The Audit
Block off 90 minutes. Open a spreadsheet with four columns: Platform, Query, What Shows Up, and Who Else Shows Up. Then run the same five to eight queries across every platform that matters for your category.
The queries should reflect how a real buyer thinks, not how your SEO team talks. If you sell data pipeline software, don’t search “best ETL tools 2026.” Search the way a frustrated data engineer would: “move data from Postgres to Snowflake,” “alternative to Fivetran,” “is Airbyte reliable,” “[your company] vs [competitor].”
Which Platforms to Check
Not all 41 sites in the SparkToro research matter for B2B. Here’s where to focus:
Google is obvious, but search it logged out and in an incognito window. Your personalized results are lying to you about what prospects actually see.
YouTube is the second-largest search engine by volume in the SparkToro data, and it’s where a lot of mid-funnel research happens. Search your category terms. Are your competitors publishing there and you’re not? Is some random creator with 4,000 subscribers shaping the narrative around your product?
Reddit doesn’t have huge search volume on its own, but Google sends enormous traffic to Reddit threads. Search your brand name, your competitors, and your category. The conversations happening there are shaping buying decisions whether you’re involved or not.
LinkedIn search is weak, but it still matters. Search your category terms and see what content surfaces. Search your company name and see what the profile looks like to a stranger.
ChatGPT and Claude. Ask both: “What are the best tools for [your category]?” and “Compare [your product] to [competitor].” The answers these tools give are increasingly shaping early-stage research, and the SparkToro data shows AI tools at about 3% of total search volume. Small, but growing in the exact use case that matters most: the moment someone is building a consideration set.
G2 and Capterra aren’t in the SparkToro research, but for B2B SaaS they function as search platforms. People go there specifically to compare products. Search your category and see where you rank.
Bing had more search volume than ChatGPT in the SparkToro data. Most B2B teams have never once checked their Bing results. It takes two minutes.
What You’re Looking For
You’re not trying to build a strategy yet. You’re trying to answer one question: if a potential buyer searched for what we do on these platforms right now, what would they find?
Sometimes the answer is nothing. Your brand simply doesn’t exist on that platform for that query. That’s useful to know.
Sometimes the answer is worse than nothing. A competitor’s content dominates. An outdated Reddit thread trashes your product. ChatGPT describes you inaccurately. A YouTube comparison video from 2023 ranks your old pricing against a competitor’s new feature set.
Sometimes you’ll find something surprising. Maybe you rank well on YouTube for a term you never optimized for. Maybe a customer wrote a Reddit post that’s doing more for your brand than your entire content program. Maybe Bing surfaces a piece of content Google buries.
The Spreadsheet Tells You Where to Start
After 90 minutes, you’ll have a grid showing your visibility across eight or nine platforms for five to eight real buyer queries. The gaps will be obvious. The priorities will suggest themselves.
One company that matters for your category will be everywhere. Another will be nowhere despite having a great product. You’ll be somewhere in between, with a few strengths you didn’t know about and several holes that explain why prospects keep saying “we almost went with [competitor].”
This isn’t a strategy. It’s a diagnostic. But it’s the diagnostic that should come before any strategy conversation about where to invest beyond Google. The SparkToro data proves search is fragmented. Your audit shows you where the fragmentation is costing you.