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Every platform with a search box is a search engine: Google, TikTok, YouTube, Amazon, app stores, voice assistants, podcasts and AI tools. Search Everywhere Optimization applies the same fundamentals, relevance, structure and authority, to all of them. Google has not shrunk. Searching has simply moved into places that were never counted as search. Start with the three surfaces your customers already use, keep your facts identical everywhere, and build content once so it can travel.
Google did not shrink. The ruler did.
You will read a lot of posts claiming Google is losing its grip. The numbers do not say that.
put Google at 91.31% of worldwide search engine market share in July 2026. Bing is 4.47%. Yahoo is 1.24%. Nothing else clears one and a half percent. That has barely moved in years.
So what has actually changed?
Searching moved into places that tracker does not count. When someone types “waterproof hiking boots” into Amazon, that is a search, and it appears in no search engine market share figure. Neither does a TikTok search for a restaurant, an App Store search for a budgeting app, a question asked out loud to a speaker, or a prompt typed into ChatGPT.
Google’s share of search engines is not the same thing as Google’s share of searching. The first is enormous and stable. The second has been quietly diluted by surfaces that were never in the denominator.
That is what Search Everywhere Optimization is for: applying the fundamentals of SEO to every surface where someone looks for something, rather than to the one surface a market-share chart happens to measure.
What Search Everywhere Optimization actually is
It is the practice of making your brand findable on every surface where people search, and it uses the same three levers everywhere.
Relevance: Does your content match what the person is actually asking?
Structure: Can the platform parse what you published and understand what it is?
Authority: Does anything outside your own control confirm you are credible?
Every ranked surface in this guide runs on some version of those three. What changes between them is what counts as content, what structure means, and where authority comes from. On Google, authority is largely links. On Amazon, it is sales velocity and reviews. In an app store, it is downloads and ratings. On YouTube, it is watch time.
That is why this is not nine separate disciplines. It is one discipline with nine dialects.
A word on names, because we use two
Two terms come up around here and they are not the same thing.
Search Everywhere is the goal. Your brand discoverable on every surface people search.
is how we get clients there. One piece of real expertise, structured for machines and distributed across all nine surfaces below, with each placement reinforcing the others.
The rest of this guide is the map. That system is the vehicle we built to drive it. If you would rather skip the map and have it run for you, that is our .
Traditional SEO versus Search Everywhere
Traditional SEO optimizes one surface. Keywords, on-page structure, backlinks, technical health, all pointed at Google’s results pages. None of it is obsolete and all of it still works, which is why remains the base layer under everything below.
Search Everywhere Optimization takes those fundamentals and applies them to every surface that ranks, recommends or cites, including the ones with no results page at all.
The practical difference is what you measure. A traditional SEO report shows rankings and organic traffic. A Search Everywhere report shows where you appear across surfaces, which is a harder question and a more useful one, because a business can be ranking well and still be absent from the three places its customers actually look.
The nine surfaces
1. Traditional search
Still first, still the largest, and still where most commercial intent lands. Google plus Bing is over 95% of search engine traffic between them.
For a local business this means the results page and the map together, since those are two different rankings with two different inputs. Relevance, distance and prominence drive the map pack; the classic signals drive the blue links. Getting one right does not get you the other, which is the most common local blind spot and why is a discipline in its own right rather than a subset.
What still moves it: fast mobile pages, content that answers a real question, a clean crawlable structure, and links from places that matter.
2. Social search
People search inside social platforms rather than searching for them. TikTok, Instagram and Pinterest all have search boxes that behave like discovery engines, and younger audiences reach for them first for anything visual, local or experiential.
What they index is not what Google indexes. The on-screen text in your video, your spoken words via auto-captions, your caption copy, your hashtags and your profile bio all carry weight. A visually perfect video with no text and a three-word caption is invisible to the search box sitting above it.
The practical move: say the search term out loud in the video, put it on screen, and write the caption as though someone will read it without watching.
3. Video search
YouTube is the second-largest search engine by query volume and behaves like one: title, description, chapters, transcript and thumbnail all feed how it ranks and recommends.
Two things most businesses skip. Chapters, because they let the platform surface a specific moment as the answer to a specific query. And the transcript, because auto-captions on a video with poor audio produce a transcript full of errors that then becomes what the platform thinks the video is about.
Video also feeds back into surface one, since video results appear inside Google, and into surface eight, since AI tools cite video content.
4. Voice search
Voice queries are spoken sentences, not typed fragments. “Where’s the nearest place that fixes a cracked screen” rather than “phone repair near me”.
Two consequences. Your content needs to contain the full question somewhere, phrased naturally, with the answer immediately after it. And your business facts need to be right in the places assistants read them, because a voice assistant gives one answer and does not offer alternatives.
This is also the surface where being wrong is most expensive. A wrong closing time in a results page costs a click. A wrong closing time read aloud costs the visit.
5. E-commerce search
If you sell products, a large share of your customers begin on a marketplace rather than a search engine. Amazon in particular functions as a product search engine with its own ranking system, and its inputs look nothing like Google’s.
Relevance comes from your title, bullet points, backend search terms and A+ content. Authority comes from sales velocity, review volume and rating. Structure comes from correct category placement and complete attributes.
The mistake is treating a marketplace listing as a copy of your product page. They are two different search engines with two different algorithms, and is a separate discipline with separate work.
6. App stores
If you have an app, the store is a search engine and it publishes how it works.
: “Search results are based on a number of factors, including text relevance (matches for your app’s title, subtitle, keywords, and primary category), as well as user behavior (downloads, ratings and reviews, and more).”
That is unusually specific for a platform owner, and it tells you exactly where to spend effort. Title, subtitle, keyword field and primary category are the fields the algorithm reads. Your app description, which is what most teams spend their time on, is not in that list. Ratings and downloads then do the authority work, which is the same pattern as every other surface here.
7. Answer engines
Answer engine optimization targets the direct-answer slot: featured snippets, AI Overviews, voice results, and the answer a chat tool composes. One answer, one source or a few, no list to be further down.
The work is structural. Question-shaped headings, the answer in the first two sentences underneath, facts stated plainly rather than implied, and structured data that says what the page is. The full discipline is in our guide to .
The distinction worth holding: ranking gets you onto a page of options, and being the answer removes the page of options.
8. AI search and GEO
Generative engine optimization is about being cited inside an AI-written answer on tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Mode.
It works at the level of your brand rather than your pages. A system composing an answer needs to state something about you confidently, which means your facts have to be consistent everywhere it can read them and confirmed somewhere you do not control.
There is also a gate most businesses never check: the crawlers that surface sites inside these tools are separate from the ones that train the models, and a robots.txt written to block training can remove you from the answers entirely. We covered the whole method, including the crawler check, in our .
How AEO and GEO relate to classic SEO is laid out in our post on .
9. Podcasts and audio
The least contested surface on this list, which is exactly why it is worth a paragraph.
Podcast apps search titles, descriptions and increasingly transcripts. An episode with a descriptive title, a real description and an accurate transcript is findable; one called “Episode 47” is not. Being a guest on someone else’s show does double duty, since it produces a searchable audio asset and an authoritative third-party mention at the same time, and the second one feeds surfaces seven and eight.
Almost nobody optimizes here. That is the argument for it.
How to actually start
Nine surfaces is a map, not a to-do list. Doing all nine badly is worse than doing three properly.
Pick your first three: For most local service businesses that is Google search plus the map pack, one social or video platform where your customers already are, and AI answers. For product businesses, swap one of those for the marketplace you sell on. If you have an app, the store is non-negotiable and everything else is secondary.
Make your facts identical everywhere first: Name, address, hours, services, pricing where you publish it. This is unglamorous, it is usually wrong in at least one place, and every other surface inherits from it. Do it before you optimize anything.
Build content once, then reshape it: A single well-researched piece becomes a video, a set of social posts, an episode, an answer, and the source material for a marketplace listing. The research is the expensive part and you only pay for it once.
Measure by presence, not by ranking: Once a quarter, search for your category on each of your three surfaces and write down whether you appear. That is a slower signal than a rankings dashboard and it is the one that matches how customers actually behave.
Then add a fourth: Only once the first three are genuinely working.
None of this survives a site that cannot be crawled properly, so is the floor rather than a later phase.
What makes this hard
It is more work, and there is no way around that: The honest answer to “can we do all nine” is usually no. That is why the first-three rule exists.
Each surface has its own rules: and expertise does not transfer cleanly. What ranks a video does not rank a product listing.
Measurement is uneven: Some surfaces report well, some report badly, and AI answers barely report at all. Any tool selling you a precise number for AI visibility is estimating.
Consistency decays: Facts drift as soon as something changes and nobody updates the other eight places. This is the failure that quietly undoes the rest, and it is the one worth building a habit around.
Where to start this week
Open a private browser window and search for what you sell on three surfaces: Google, whichever social or video platform your customers use, and an AI tool.
Write down whether you appear on each. That is your baseline, it takes ten minutes, and it is more informative than any audit you could buy in the same amount of time.
Then fix the facts that turn out to be wrong, because they will be, and pick the one surface where being absent is costing you the most.
If you would rather have all of it run as one programme rather than nine projects, that is what we do.
Frequently Asked Questions
It is the practice of making your brand discoverable on every surface people search: Google, social platforms, video, voice assistants, marketplaces, app stores, podcasts and AI tools. Each of those is a search engine with its own ranking system, and Search Everywhere treats them as one programme rather than nine.
Traditional SEO optimizes one surface, Google’s results pages. Search Everywhere applies the same fundamentals, relevance, structure and authority, to every surface your customers use. The skills transfer. What changes is what counts as content and where authority comes from on each platform.
Both, depending on where you are. American English uses optimization, British and Australian English use optimisation, and the practice is identical either way. You will also see it written as search anywhere optimization, which means the same thing.
No. StatCounter put Google at 91.31% of worldwide search engine market share in July 2026, and that figure has been stable for years. What changed is that a great deal of searching now happens inside Amazon, TikTok, app stores and AI tools, none of which are counted as search engines in that measurement.
The three your customers already use. For most local businesses that is Google search and maps, one social or video platform, and AI answers. If you sell products, include the marketplace you sell on. Everywhere is the destination, not the first step.
It is the present. The skills of SEO applied to every surface that ranks, recommends or cites. A business still measuring only Google rankings is reading one gauge on a full dashboard.
