Definition
Voice search is searching by speaking instead of typing. Speech is converted to text and run as an ordinary query, which is the part most advice skips: it is a different input method, not a separate index, and there is no separate set of voice rankings to optimise for.
Example. Asking a phone for the closest hardware store that is open now runs the same kind of search you would have typed, and returns a result the assistant reads aloud.
You can preview how your listing reads when an assistant summarises it with the free SERP Snippet Checker.
Was half of all search really going to be voice by 2020?
No, and the statistic everyone quotes was never real. The claim usually appears as "ComScore predicted 50% of searches would be voice by 2020". ComScore has said it is not their figure.
The traceable origin is a 2014 prediction by Andrew Ng, then at Baidu, that within five years at least half of searches would be through images or speech. Images were dropped somewhere along the way, and the 2020 date came from a timeline in Mary Meeker's 2016 internet trends deck. The year passed, and no credible measurement has put voice anywhere near half.
It is worth knowing because the statistic is still the opening line of most voice search advice, which tells you how carefully the rest of that advice was checked.
Can you measure your own voice search traffic?
You cannot measure it. Search Console has no voice dimension, so voice queries arrive mixed in with typed ones and no report separates them. Anyone quoting your voice search share is modelling it, not measuring it.
What you can do instead is watch the question-shaped queries in Search Console, since spoken queries skew longer and more conversational, and check whether assistants answer questions about you correctly.
What actually helps with voice search?
What helps is the same work that wins a spoken-length answer anywhere: a direct answer in the first sentence under a question heading, accurate business details for local questions, and pages fast enough to be read from. There is no voice-specific markup for the general case. Google's speakable structured data exists, and its documentation still describes it as beta, limited to news content and to users in the United States with Google Home devices set to English.
Sources
- Google Search Central: speakable structured data
- Brodie Clark: stop using ComScore's 2020 voice search statistic
- Econsultancy: why we need to stop repeating the 50% by 2020 voice search prediction
Last checked against these sources on 23 September 2026.