By Chrissy Blasinsky

ALEXANDRIA, Va.—Searching the web is something most people do multiple times a day. According to Hubspot, it's estimated that Google processes about 63,000 search queries every second, translating to 5.6 billion searches per day and about 2 trillion global searches per year. The average person conducts between three and four searches each day.

On stage at the 2021 NACS Show, NACS President and CEO Henry Armour shared a video by Lori Stillman, NACS’ vice president of research, who toured some convenience stores in her area to find out how well convenience stores were “found” via voice searching. The results suggest how c-stores were not found, even as she stood next to an ATM and voice searched where to find the closest ATM, or stood inside a store with a substantial coffee program asking, “Where can I get a cup of coffee?”

The crux of the experiment was to strawman a new initiative to help customers find convenience stores among a sea of billions of daily web searches. Think of it as winning trips and building bigger baskets 2.0, because there are customers searching for c-stores and their offers as you read this sentence. 

Read more about how the people who are looking for you—whether they know it or not—can find you in this month’s Convenience Corner blog post.

Chrissy Blasinsky is the content communications strategist at NACS and tries really hard not to search for crossword answers that stump her.