How Much Traffic Does Google Have Anyway?  The Answer Might Surprise You…

The internet has come to be synonymous with a few Goliath companies, namely Google and Facebook, and maybe Amazon.  In reality, most of us spend the majority of our time on those 3 sites.  Computers have even become known as “Google machines”, because whenever you need to start navigating the web, the first thing you do is “Google it”.

So that raises the question, how much traffic does google have anyway?  What portion of the Internet’s traffic is coming through Google?  Turns out, it surprisingly hard to figure that number out…

Due to the proprietary nature of Internet infrastructure, along with the prevalence of bot traffic across the web, it’s essentially impossible for any private analysis to determine total traffic across the web, but we do have some interesting insights…

Google goes down for 4 minutes, Internet traffic reduced by 40%

The first peak we have as to the percentage of Google traffic comes from a 4 minute span in August of 2013, when Google services went down.  Thanks to insights from GoSquared analytics, we know that during that period the overall activity crashed by 40%, only to rebound minutes later when the services were restored.

Thanks to this insight, we can say with some certainty that Google services account for approximately 40% of all traffic on the Internet.

SimilarWeb gives us granular insights, raw numbers

Now that we have an idea as to the percentage attributed to Google, what about the raw numbers?  Thanks to the infinitely useful SimilarWeb, we can see those number clear as day, see screenshot below:

40 Billion! Wow.  Bear in mind there are only 8 billion people on the entire planet (and this is only the US-based Google.com).

So next time the question comes up as to why you should have a web presence for your business, or whether you should invest in SEO/PPC (Google search) or Email marketing (Gmail), you can reference these numbers.