X/Twitter one year on: Site traffic is up 22.3%

It's been just over a year since Elon Musk officially took over Twitter and a little over 4 months since the official rebranding to X.

With advertisers abandoning the platform and revenue dropping, new features being added (and removed) and plenty of controversy, it would be an understatement to say that a lot has happened during that time. 

But has that made the platform more popular, both in terms of searches and web traffic? 

Using Google Trends’ data and SEO tool Ahrefs, domain and hosting provider Fasthosts investigated the online presence of X/Twitter under the turbulent leadership of Elon Musk.

The search data

With the official name change from Twitter to X taking place at the tail end of July, Fasthosts looked into the values for a few search terms from August to November 2023 to see the effects of the change in action. 

Searches for just the term “X” have increased by 19.4%, while searches for “Twitter” have fallen by 26% in the same period, found Fasthosts. 

While plenty still refer to X as its former title and news outlets still often follow mentions of X with “formerly Twitter”, it’s clear from this data that interest in the term Twitter is fading, slowly but surely. 

Since the switch, searches for “create X account” have also risen by 142.86%. This is expected and not meteoric given the rename of the platform, especially when considering the 66% increase in searches for “delete x account” that it’s accompanied by. 

The web stats

Despite the name and branding change, X still uses the twitter.com domain, meaning it’s easy to track how traffic to the site has evolved. 

Comparing the numbers from April 2022 (66,397,934) when the takeover was announced to November 2022 (61,176,937) when it was completed, site traffic fell by 7.86% as concerns for the future of the platform grew.

One year on, traffic has grown by 22.3% from November 2022 to 2023 with 74,844,760 visits, reaching its highest value since February 2022.

This statistic is definitely a surprising one, indicating that despite all of the controversy and split opinions on the platform, it’s now the most popular that it’s been in 18 months. 

Whether this is down to new or returning users or people flocking to the site to see the chaos unfold is difficult to say. 

While it’ll be interesting to see how the platform continues over the next few months after Musk’s recent advertiser tirade, one thing is for sure – there are plenty of people watching.