Data studies on how internet businesses get found
Strandline Research crawls websites, search results and AI answers, and publishes what it finds along with the data behind every chart.
Latest reports
- No. 10
Microsoft Clarity is the only one of 11 session replay tools whose free hosted plan still records every session at 50,000 a month
We read the pricing pages of 11 session replay tools on 25 October 2026 and worked out the cheapest printed plan that records every session at 1,000 to 100,000 sessions a month.
- No. 09
Reddit comment prices run from $3 to $67 across 6 services that price comments
We converted the published prices of 6 Reddit marketing services that sell comments, read on 6 October 2026 and re-checked on 30 October 2026, into a cost per Reddit comment. The cheapest is 22 times cheaper than the most expensive.
- No. 07
3 of 11 done-for-you Reddit marketing services give credit back when a comment is removed
We read the pricing, service and terms pages of 11 services that write and post Reddit comments for brands on 6 October 2026, re-checked them on 30 October 2026, and scored each on 7 published criteria. 7 post a price, 3 credit removed comments, and 2 say on their own pages that they do not sell or use vote manipulation.
- No. 06
81.9% of the brand-mention comments one Reddit marketing service posted from 1 to 22 September 2026 were removed within a week, up from 45.6% in August
We read the delivery records of 11,270 comments one Reddit marketing service placed in 3,143 subreddits from 16 July to 22 September 2026. The share removed within a week jumped with comments posted on 2 September, in every brand and subreddit group we could compare.
- No. 05
Queries that look like AI fan-out made up 6.1% of 27 sites' visible Google impressions, ranked higher than keywords and drew 3 clicks
We sorted the queries behind 358,745 visible Search Console impressions on 27 small and mid-size websites from 24 June to 21 September 2026: long conversational queries averaged position 14.9 against 33.1 for keyword queries, and their share rose from 4.8% in the first four weeks to 7.4% in the last four.
- No. 04
17.5% of new .com websites serve an llms.txt file, and most of those files are Shopify, GoDaddy and Wix defaults
We crawled 4,472 live sites on .com domains registered 9 to 22 September 2026 and 1,076 established sites: new sites serve llms.txt more often (17.5% against 12.5%), but without platform defaults their rate is 5.6%, half the established 11.2%.
- No. 03
54.2% of the brand-mention comments one Reddit marketing service placed were removed within a week, and 47.1% of those removals came on the day of posting
We read the delivery records of 10,752 comments one Reddit marketing service placed in 3,014 subreddits from 16 July to 16 September 2026. A quarter were gone by the same afternoon, and subreddit size barely changed the odds.
- No. 02
A B2B site added 34 pages, 12 of them comparison listicles. ChatGPT referrals went from 2 to 46 per fortnight
We measured one US lead-generation agency that published 34 pages from 3 to 22 September 2026: in two-week windows matched by weekday, its ChatGPT referral visitors rose from 2 to 46, while generic AI answers still did not name it.
- No. 01
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude rarely cite the same page for the same buyer question
A study of 2,086 answers from the four engines to buyer-intent prompts found that 87.3% of the 17,483 pages cited for a prompt in a single run came from only one engine.