Taylor Swift, as WIRED has reported in the past, rules the internet. She’s one of the most Googled celebrities in the world. Her search engine optimization, or SEO, in industry parlance, is on fire. She’s a Tumblr kid turned titan of industry (her Eras Tour, after it broke Ticketmaster, made billions) who is even capable of bringing Apple to heel. If we were ever to do one of our Autocomplete Interviews with her, the top questions would probably be something like “Does Taylor Swift have a boyfriend?” or “What is Taylor Swift’s net worth?” or “What happened between Taylor Swift and Karlie Kloss?”
This week, though, the results for “Taylor Swift jets” look very different than they would have a month ago. Why? Last Sunday, Swift and a bunch of famous pals like Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, and Shawn Levy were spotted at the New York Jets game. Previously, searches related to Swift and jets would have turned up results about the Grammy winner’s use of private jets and those jets’ carbon emissions, leading some folks (OK, Vulture) to ask: “Did Taylor Swift Attend a New York Jets Game to Detract From Her Private Jets?”
No one will ever know if Swift went to a Jets game specifically to shift the SEO for “Taylor Swift jets,” but what is true is that interest in that search is currently the highest it's ever been on Google Trends. Comparatively, the interest in the search term in summer 2022, when the news was going around about her PJs, has been bumped down to single digits. So if it was a gambit, it worked. Not only are the search results upended, but now TikTok videos about the “genius” move are getting half a million views.
On Tuesday, Britney Muller, a marketing and machine-learning consultant based in New York state, posted on X (fka Twitter) that the move was “a PR Masterclasses” [sic]. It “blew up” more than she intended. That’s partly because most things about Swift draw attention, but also because she is perceived as a mastermind, someone who would show her face at the football game of her maybe-beau in an attempt to draw search engine attention to the fact that she saw the Jets play rather than news that she reportedly took scores of private jet flights in 2022. (At the time, the singer’s rep denied that all the flights attributed to Swift were hers.)
“It almost feels like she’s the queen on the chessboard,” Muller says. “It’s a possible theory, and if it’s just a wild coincidence, it’s a wild coincidence, but it could also be one of the most calculated PR stunts of all time.”
Bear in mind, there’s backstory here, which provides other reasons for Swift to be at a Jets game besides juicing SEO. Mainly that she’s rumored to be dating Travis Kelce, a tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs, the team that (barely) beat the Jets on Sunday night.
Ever since gossip about the two began to spread—after she was spotted in a private box watching the Chiefs play the Chicago Bears with Kelce’s mom, Donna—there have been wild theories as to what Swift’s play is. Because she can’t just date someone without it being think-pieced to death, speculation immediately arose that her cheering was a ploy to distract from her friend Sophie Turner’s recent breakup with Joe Jonas, a bid to make nice with the NFL, or to tank the Chiefs’ season so her favored Philadelphia Eagles could win the Super Bowl.
Among these rumors, “trying to influence SEO” is just one—and it’s likely no one will ever know if any are true.
There are reasons that rumors like this proliferate. Most of them have to do with the fact that people are endlessly fascinated by Taylor Swift. Whether they love hot gossip about who she’s dating or think she’s the kind of artist who would attend an NFL game to influence Google results, they’re always trying to decode her life. Swift is smart—she is, after all, rerecording much of her discography to wrest control back from the people who bought and sold her masters—and she frequently drops hints about her plans in songs and social media, so the game is always afoot.
Fan, uh, interest in Swift’s life goes back to her early days of fame, but it likely peaked in the period leading up to her album Reputation, a time when she was in an impossibly weird public spat with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. It’s too much to get into, but it has reverberated for years, so much so that Vox did a 10-year-anniversary explainer—and if you want to know if it’s still relevant, the last time Swift went to a Chiefs game, like two weeks ago, fans speculated that she did it to outshine Kardashian’s announcement that Usher would be headlining the Super Bowl halftime show this season.
Then there’s the matter of model Karlie Kloss. The long and short of that internet rabbit hole is that Swift and Kloss were sharing-a-Vogue-cover-public friends back in like 2015, and now it seems like they aren’t. Some people think they dated, others believe they had a falling out. Jennifer Lawrence once fretted about it on a press tour. Some think that Swift’s “Cornelia Street” is about Kloss. The model showed up to the Eras Tour, igniting the rumor mill all over again.
Look, the point of investigating things like whether or not Swift went to a Jets game to tweak her Google results will never be to find out if she really did. Ultimately, people want to know whether she really is a public persona genius, and if so, what lengths she’ll go to for reputation laundering. Her net worth, which is reportedly a lot more than Kelce's, is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, but her value is in her brand. Per the “Taylor Swift Effect,” Kelce is already poised to make more money than he was before the dating rumors started. His jersey sales are up 400 percent; Swifties are watching the NFL.
Swift’s biggest source of clout is her name, not necessarily what’s Googled alongside of it. You might have noticed throughout this piece there are several keywords, many of them with links, and subheadings with commonly searched questions about the singer. As I wrote this, I realized how easy it was to think Swift would factor in the name of New York’s football team when she went to MetLife Stadium on Sunday. Because I do it often; it’s second nature when you write for the internet. That Vulture story has been amongst the site’s most popular since it went up earlier this week, often in the top slot. Taylor Swift probably isn’t trying to game her SEO, but I am. Who’s the mastermind now?
