Who searches for emojis on Google? 🤔

Who searches for emojis on Google? 🤔

Apparently LOTS of people do, and so did I this morning. 👀 and here's what I saw:

"____ emoji" keywords have millions of global searches a month, and the keyword difficulty for many of them is 0. Enticing? Lots of websites think so:

But hoping for traffic from head terms with thin content is not a sustainable strategy, and also not a great user experience. The US traffic potential for these emoji keywords is much less than its search volume, sometimes 10x as less!

This has been happening even before the AI Era.

Some would say - Google is stealing traffic from websites by 'SERP featuring' these obvious results, but IMHO - this is just any good product improving its user experience - why would you want to click a website and watch an ad-littered page to copy an emoji? I think Google is even losing money on this as they can't monetize clicks via Adsense on the emoji websites.

I think it's not just AI Overviews, AI assistants or SERP features that rob traffic from websites - anything that can be easily summarized or turned into a SERP feature will become one (or get SERP-ed: What I calling a website with thin content losing traffic to a SERP feature).

The more marketing changes, the more it stays the same. Good, high quality opinionated content wins: its better user experience, and it's just the right thing to do. Our Ahrefs Blog is a great example of this.

Don't get SERP-ed in 2026.

What do y'all think?

Tools used - Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, Ahrefs MCP Server, Claude, Gemini, and Good 'ol Google Search on the desktop 😉