The State of Voice Search in 2018
Where voice search stood in 2018: smart speaker adoption after a record holiday, Apple's HomePod launch and what businesses were realistically getting from it.
Halfway through 2018, voice search had moved well past the early-adopter phase without quite becoming the transformation some of the 2017 hype predicted. Here’s an honest snapshot of where things stood.
Smart speakers were now a normal household item
The 2017 holiday season pushed smart speaker ownership meaningfully higher, with Amazon and Google both reporting strong sales, and Apple entered the category in February 2018 when the HomePod finally shipped after its June 2017 announcement. With three major players now competing on hardware, smart speakers had crossed from “thing your tech-savvy friend has” to a common household device, and that meant a steadily growing share of search queries were arriving as spoken questions with no screen attached.
Skill and Action counts kept climbing, usage stayed uneven
Alexa’s skill catalog passed 30,000 during 2018 and kept growing, and Google Assistant’s Actions library grew alongside it. But the gap between how many skills existed and how many people used any given one beyond a first try remained wide. Most households, it turned out, used their smart speaker for a narrow set of habits: weather, timers, music and simple facts, not the long tail of niche branded skills companies had rushed to build the year before.
Local intent stayed the clearest business use case
The most reliable pattern for businesses in 2018 was local: “find a locksmith near me,” “what time does the pharmacy close,” “directions to.” These queries rewarded the same fundamentals that mattered for regular local search, an accurate, complete Google My Business profile and a fast, well-structured site, rather than any voice-specific tactic. Businesses chasing a dedicated “voice strategy” often found there wasn’t one to build; there was just local search, now answered out loud sometimes instead of read off a screen.
Voice commerce stayed mostly theoretical
Industry conversation about “voice commerce,” ordering products by asking a speaker, ran well ahead of actual consumer behavior in 2018. Reordering household basics through Alexa existed and got attention, but broad voice-driven purchasing hadn’t materialized the way some 2017 forecasts suggested it would. Businesses banking a 2018 marketing budget on voice-driven sales were, for the most part, banking on a market that hadn’t shown up yet.
The realistic takeaway
By mid-2018, the state of voice search was less a revolution than a steady, structural shift: more queries arriving without a screen, more weight on featured snippets and local listings as the source of spoken answers and little evidence that businesses needed a separate voice-specific playbook. The work that mattered was the same clear, well-structured, locally accurate content that had mattered before speakers showed up, just with one more way for it to reach a customer.
More from this year: browse the SEO archive or see everything published in 2018.
