World Cup 2022 Interest Building

Keyword searches spike ahead of the event

World Cup 2022 starts November 20 and runs through December, while most World Cups usually take place from June through July. The date was pushed back to cope with the extreme heat in host country, Qatar. As a result, many interested viewers may be confused as to when the event is taking place. We took a look at keyword searches using Similarweb data to see what searches are trending.

Key takeaways

• Between August and September, searches for “World Cup 2022” rose 80% to 1.8 million.
• Searches for “World Cup” hit 2.1 million in September and were up 74% month over month.
• Over the past 28 days (through October 30), searches for World Cup were up 66% to 1.3 million.
• Leading beneficiaries of these searches included FIFA, Google, Wikipedia and Marca.com, among others.

Interest rising ahead of World Cup 2022

The chart below tracks five keywords since January 2022 and shows that interest in the World Cup is rising as we get closer to the preliminary matches. Most World Cup-related searches have seen a spike over the past month. including “World Cup 2022” (1.8 million searches in September), and “World Cup” (2.1 million searches in September, and 1.3 million views over the past 28 days through October 30).

Google, Wikipedia, leading beneficiaries of World Cup interest

The below chart shows the leading beneficiaries of keyword searches. The biggest portion of them was filtered through Google, which is where that search traffic originated, and Google was able to answer their question. Secondly, those wanting more info than Google or other sources could provide went to Wikipedia. Fifa.com saw the third-largest percentage of traffic following these keyword searches.

Global interest is widespread for the upcoming World Cup

Traffic by country is an interesting way to look at Similarweb keyword data. You can see in the chart below that the U.S. has the largest share of inquiries for the top 5 keyword searches, followed by India, the U.K. and Canada. However, the full list of countries searching for information on World Cup 2022 is long, showing wide geographic diversity of interest on the topic.

Conclusion

With the World Cup delayed from its usual calendar slot, it’s clear that many people are interested in information on the event, when it is taking place, and how to stream it. Keyword traffic has risen in the lead-up to the event, a good sign for audience interest.

The Similarweb Insights & Communications team is available to pull additional or updated data on request for the news media (journalists are invited to write to press@similarweb.com). When citing our data, please reference Similarweb as the source and link back to the most relevant blog post or similarweb.com/corp/blog/insights/.

Methodology

Disclaimer: All data, reports and other materials provided or made available by Similarweb are based on data obtained from third parties, including estimations and extrapolations based on such data. Similarweb shall not be responsible for the accuracy of the materials and shall have no liability for any decision by any third party based in whole or in part on the materials.