Spoke
Search everywhere
People look inside video platforms, marketplaces, app stores, maps and assistants. Each one ranks things its own way, and a plan aimed only at web search misses where the decision actually gets made.
That search behavior is spread across platforms is directly observable. How each platform ranks things isn't documented in any comparable way, and we claim no weighting.
"Search" is a habit, not a website.
People search inside whatever they're already in, and the thing that answers them often isn't a search engine at all.
What does "search everywhere" mean?
It means searching is spread across platforms instead of concentrated in web search. People look for how-to answers inside video, for businesses inside maps, for products inside marketplaces, for recommendations inside communities, and increasingly for all of it inside an assistant.
So a plan aimed only at web search can be executed perfectly and still miss the place where somebody decides.
The places that behave like search
Video. The second-biggest search behavior for how-to and show-me questions. Titles, descriptions, transcripts and watch time all feed ranking — and transcripts make the video findable from web search too.
Maps. A search engine with a map attached, covered in local. For a business with an office, often the single most important surface there is.
Marketplaces. For anything you can buy, product search frequently starts here and never touches web search.
App stores. Their own search, their own logic, their own metadata.
Communities. Where people ask other people. See Reddit and communities.
Assistants. The newest one, and what most of this site is about.
Choosing, and choosing to skip
The failure here is treating this as a checklist to complete.
A presence on six platforms that nobody maintains is worse than one strong presence. Six half-finished profiles publish six slightly different versions of your company, which is the entity problem all over again.
Pick on evidence. Ask clients where they look. Check which platforms rank for your category's questions. Look at what competitors actually maintain, not what they merely occupy.
Then be explicit about the rest. "We're not on that platform, on purpose, because our clients aren't" is a strategy. Having no presence because nobody thought about it is an accident that looks identical from the outside.
What they all reward
The same things. Describe accurately what you do, in the words your audience uses, consistently with how you describe yourself everywhere else.
Which means the entity work pays off across all of them at once. The canonical record that fixes your directory listings fixes your platform profiles too.
More in Off-site authority
Digital PR
The only durable way to earn third-party mentions is to make something worth mentioning. It's slower than buying links. It's also the version that never turns into a liability.
Monitoring mentions
You are being described across the web right now, mostly by people who will never tell you. Finding those descriptions and correcting the wrong ones is cheap, and almost nobody does it.