Research Publication

Proceedings of the ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval conference, the leading academic venue for search ranking, evaluation and retrieval research.

Index-scale studies published on the Ahrefs blog using its own web crawl and keyword databases, covering topics such as link decay, traffic distribution and AI search citations.

Preprint stream for information retrieval research, the primary venue where retrieval-augmented generation, ranking model and query understanding papers relevant to search appear first.

Large-sample SEO studies published by Backlinko, including analyses of ranking correlations, search behaviour and content performance across millions of results.

Research hub publishing the annual Local Consumer Review Survey and other recurring studies on local search behaviour, reviews and Google Business Profile usage.

Google's public dataset of real-user performance metrics from Chrome, the data source behind Core Web Vitals assessments in Search Console and PageSpeed Insights.

Clickstream data provider whose panel underpins widely cited studies on zero-click search, AI chatbot usage and search engine market share, often published jointly with SparkToro and Semrush.

Korean digital advertising and marketing knowledge portal publishing market, consumer and digital media research reports. Some reports are free and others require a paid subscription.

Annual, community-written report analysing millions of websites across performance, SEO, markup, accessibility and third parties. The SEO chapter is a standard reference on real-world adoption of SEO practices.

Recurring expert survey and analysis of the factors influencing local pack and local organic rankings, long used as a reference framework for local SEO.

Annual and recurring studies published by Semrush on search traffic, AI search referrals, ranking factors and industry benchmarks, drawn from its keyword and traffic databases.

Clickstream-based reports on search engine and AI assistant traffic share, referral patterns to publishers and category-level web traffic trends.

Recurring studies by Rand Fishkin, produced with Datos clickstream panels, quantifying zero-click searches, Google's traffic share and where web referrals actually originate.