Since the announcement in April 2022 that Elon Musk would be buying Twitter (now X), it’s safe to say that it’s become one of the most talked about social media platforms on the market. With name changes, new features being added (and removed) and plenty of controversy, it’s been a lively year for X.

But has that made the platform more popular, both in terms of searches and web traffic? Using the data available on Google Trends as well as SEO tool Ahrefs, domain and hosting provider Fasthosts investigated the online presence of X since the announcement of Musk’s takeover and his official purchase of the platform, just over one year on from his taking of the reins.

With the official name change from Twitter to X taking place at the tail end of July, Fasthosts looked into the values for a few search terms from August – November 2023 to see the effects of the change in action.

For starters, searches for just the term ‘X’ have increased by 19.4 per cent, while searches for ‘Twitter’ have fallen by 26 per cent in the same period. While plenty of peopke still refer to X as its former title and news outlets still often follow mentions of X with “formally Twitter”, it’s clear from this data that interest in the term Twitter is fading, slowly but surely.

Since the switch, searches for ‘create X account’ have also risen by 142.86 per cent. While there was going to be a rise in these searches given that’s now the name of the platform, it’s not exactly a meteoric one, especially when considering the 66 per cent increase in searches for ‘delete x account’ that it’s accompanied by.

Despite the name and branding change, X still uses the twitter.com domain, meaning it’s easy to track how traffic to the site has evolved.

Comparing the numbers from April 2022 (66,397,934) when the takeover was announced to November 2022 (61,176,937) when it was completed, site traffic fell by 7.86 per cent as concerns for the future of the platform grew.

One year on, traffic has grown by 22.3 per cent from November 22-23 with 74,844,760 visits, reaching its highest value since February 2022. All things considered, this statistic is a surprising one, indicating that despite all of the controversy and split opinions on the platform, it’s now the most popular that it’s been in 18 months. Whether this is down to new/returning users or people flocking to the site to see the chaos unfold is difficult to say, however, the numbers speak for themselves.

Fasthosts concludes: “While it’ll be interesting to see how the platform continues over the next few months after Musk’s recent advertiser tirade, one thing is for sure – there are plenty of people watching.”