Nuclear War Anxieties Influence Search and Web Traffic

With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at the end of February, our data depicts that growing concern about nuclear war – which had receded since the end of the Cold War – has resurged.

By the numbers

• 120,000 visits to the U.S. government page offering advice on how to survive a nuclear explosion on February 28, 2022, up from almost nothing a few days before, according to Similarweb estimates.
• Growing interest in potassium iodide pills, a preventative treatment for thyroid cancer, one of the major consequences of radiation exposure, as seen in Amazon searches and visits to the websites of companies who make the pills.
• Inrcreased searches on phrases like “nuclear bunker near me”
• Surges in traffic to some survivalist websites.

What to know for now

Whether the use of tactical nuclear weapons by Russia would escalate or not is an unsettling possibility – as our data shows.

For more detail, download the full report. The Similarweb Insights Newsroom is available to pull additional or updated data on request for the news media (journalists are invited to write to press@similarweb.com). Please cite Similarweb as the source and link back to this post as a reference for your readers.

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by David F. Carr

David covers social media, digital advertising, and generative AI. With a background in web trends since the 1990s, he’s also the author of "Social Collaboration for Dummies".