“Olympics Basketball” is the Sport Driving the Most Traffic for Paris Olympics

Traffic to the official Olympics website is up 26% over the last week, with basketball as the sport driving the most search traffic

The Paris Olympics are building up to an opening ceremony kickoff on Friday, although some preliminary events are already underway. Here is what is driving the most interest online, based on search and web traffic data.

Key takeaways

• Over the past 28 days, more than three-quarters of the traffic to olympics.com, the official website of the games, has been driven by search. That makes an analysis of search terms a strong indicator of what people are most interested in.
• Basketball is the sport driving the most interest, particularly from the US but also worldwide. In the US, the search volume for “Olympics basketball” was up more than 2,000% over the last 28 days.
• Soccer, tennis, track and field events, and gymnastics drove the next most interest.
• Incoming traffic from search also includes many searches referencing specific soccer matchups such as “Colombia vs Paraguay.” These appear to be related to events outside of the Olympics, such as the recent COPA America games, that attracted incidental clicks to content on olympics.com.
• Other searches relate to specific athletes like track star Noah Lyles (+319%) and gymnast Simone Biles (+112%).

Basketball is big, particularly for US fans

Most of the search terms driving traffic to the olympics.com website were related to general information about the games and the schedule, but of those that mentioned a specific sport, one sport stood out: basketball. This was particularly true for searches originating in the US, accounting for 14 of the top 100 searches representing over 1.5 million visits (out of more than 10.4 million total) over the last 28 days.

Interest from the US was particularly intense, with searches for “Olympics basketball” up more than 2,000% over the last 28 days, but worldwide it was also up 1,720%. Even filtering for searches from within France, there are were few hits on terms like “calendrier basket” (basketball schedule) in the top 100, with search volume up 333%.

For a more detailed ranking, we looked at search traffic for keywords related to some of the top sports (grouping several events into “track and field”), worldwide. The metric in the chart above is “search clicks” – not just how often internet users saw olympics.com in their search results but how often they were motivated to click through for more detail.

Alongside the traditional events, new ones like “breaking” (or break dancing) are generating interest, with search traffic for “olympic breaking” up 487% over the last 28 days.

Overall interest in the Olympics

The searches generating the most clicks were more general terms about the Olympics and its schedule of events.

Total traffic to olympics.com has been rising steadily.

… and three-quarters of that traffic is driven by search.

Other sites capturing Olympics search traffic

While olympics.com captures the greatest share of organic search on “Olympics”, it shares that traffic with other news and sports publications, including the site for NBC’s coverage of the games across broadcast channels and its Peacock streaming service.

Just getting started

These search trends tell us what sports fans are most interested about in anticipation of the games, but the drama of this extended event will come from the unexpected victories and defeats between now and the closing ceremonies on August 11. We’ll be watching to see what changes.

The Similarweb Insights & Communications team is available to pull additional or updated data on request for the news media (journalists are invited to write to press@similarweb.com). When citing our data, please reference Similarweb as the source and link back to the most relevant blog post or similarweb.com/blog/insights/.

Methodology

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Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

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".