It's estimated based on how the company generates revenue and what they've said regarding search traffic during investor updates. A SaaS company like HubSpot might get most of their traffic from search (a higher reliance), but they also primarily generate recurring revenue from existing customers (a lower reliance).

The thought process is, "If this company were to lose all search traffic tomorrow, how detrimental would it be for them?".

For a brand like Nerdwallet, who have talked about Google algorithm updates multiple times, being banned by Google would be far more detrimental to their business than a company like Rackspace.

We don't know what we don't know. There might be an element of how some of these companies make money they aren't open about. It's probably best to simply view them as having a higher reliance on search compared to other companies on the list.

Alright, so that's technically not a question but something I should definitely answer — especially when I've been reporting on them for years.

If we're missing a company it's likely because they're behind so many brands it's harder to estimate their reliance on search traffic. It's also more difficult to include them in a table (which site of theirs would we link to?).

Ziff Davis is another brand we haven't included. They run lots of content sites like Cnet and ZDNet, but also SaaS businesses like Moz and iContact. If there's demand for it, I'll happily try to separate companies like this in a smart way.

You have a good eye. Our primary focus throughout Gaps is on internet-first startups, but we make exceptions when we believe a company will be be increasingly reliant on generating revenue online going forward.

There are over 3,500 companies listed on the NASDAQ alone. We've only listed 91 here in total, so I promise we're picky and have a good reason for including each brand.

The revenue figures are updated every quarter, over the period of a few weeks (not every company releases their numbers at the same time). For some businesses, they only report revenues every six months. We need these to be accurate for the rest of Gaps, so we'll keep them fresh. They're recent as of December 19th, 2024.

The search trend charts are refreshed once per month. While I hope they're useful, it's better to look at these in your favourite SEO research tool (like Ahrefs) for more granular data.

There are still some companies I want to add, like Reddit (Update: added!) and Squarespace. It would also be cool to overlay stock charts here as well.

For now, I really just needed to get this out there and get some feedback before iterating on things people might not want.

After a decade of writing about SEO on our sister site, Detailed.com, I (Glen Allsopp) constantly saw how much search, social media and ad algorithms impacted businesses generating revenue online. I created Gaps to document the businesses and startup ideas which continue to thrive.

As a bonus, I'm also solving a frustration when I try to find the revenue numbers of a company, only to see Google reward numbers I knew are completely wrong. I think we can do a better job than public companies (like ZoomInfo) simply by caring about having more accurate figures.

Please send us an email to [email protected] with your recommendation. Thank you!