This kind of prime real estate on Google results may carry over to the X brand, but that is entirely at Google’s discretion and may depend on the strength of the new brand.
Quantifying Twitter’s brand power
Across the approximately 12 Million search queries Twitter ranked for in Moz’s data, we examined just the ones that received 150+ searches per month and where Twitter ranked on page one, which left us with about 600,000 unique queries.
We analyzed those 600K queries for brand signals and ended up with 10,149 search queries. While this may not seem like a lot compared to 12 Million, it represents a massive influence of the Twitter brand. All told, these 10K queries drive over 18 Million searches per month.
The problem for ‘X’ is that the vast majority of these brand-like searches reference Twitter or associated brand terms (like “tweet” and “Tweetdeck”) directly. To recapture this search volume and traffic long-term, ‘X’ will have to reach a level of brand awareness where searchers are actively looking for terms like “Taylor Swift X” and “Fortnite X’.
The confusing history of X.com
X.com currently ranks for no keywords in our databases, due to a number of long-term issues. It doesn’t take a lot of math to tell you that this drives zero brand searches. This situation will undoubtedly change, but X.com faces another challenge — it has been used to house a number of sites (with multiple owners) and also has redirected to Musk’s wider brand portfolio. To understand X.com’s more than 25-year history, you really need to see it.
The early years (1995–2000)
Using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, we can capture a bit of this confusing history. The X.com domain was originally owned by Dave Weinstein, who launched the site in 1995 or 1996, in pretty typical mid-1990s fashion:
