STUDY: SWIFT IS AMERICA’S “MOST INFLUENTIAL” CELEB

To the surprise of few, Taylor Swift is America’s most influential celebrity, according to a new study by the digital marketing company Authority Hacker. After analyzing the 50-most-followed accounts on Instagram, Twitter/X and YouTube, Authority Hacker reports that Swift inspires close to 4.6m monthly Google searches, nearly 1.8m more than her next-closest competitors, Elon Musk and LeBron James.

Swift’s cultural dominance has made her the top celebrity Google search in every one of the 50 states except for Mississippi, where James is #1. Authority Hacker also says if Swift (pictured with fellow Grammy nominee Ice Spice) were to monetize her social-media feeds with sponsored posts to, say, her 274m Instagram followers, she could command up to $625,700 per branded collaboration. Not that she's hurting for cash.

Some other findings from Authority Hacker’s research: The very Canadian Drake is the #2 most-searched celebrity on Google in Kentucky, Billie Eilish is the #3 most-searched in Alaska, and Harry Styles and Miley Cyrus are the fourth-most-queried in Vermont and West Virginia, respectively. Why, you could knock us over with a wrecking ball.

A number of other musicians round out the Top 10 of the Authority Hacker list, including Rihanna at #4 (2.34m Google searchers per month), Selena Gomez at #5 (2.04m), Ariana Grande at #8 (1.73m), Justin Bieber at #9 (1.65m) and Eilish at #10 (1.62m). Sometimes people accidentally come to HITS looking for baseball statistics, which might eventually push us into the top 17,000,000.