BuzzSumo indexes 2.5+ million new articles every day and holds over 3.5 billion articles in our index. But we know that we don't pick up everything. If you don't see an article in our database that you know exists, here are a few potential reasons why.

BuzzSumo prioritizes content that drives engagement to present the most relevant results for your search. While we try to capture as much content from as many global sources as we can, we occasionally miss articles that have driven little to no engagement.

If you suspect we have missed an article, we recommend using our Chrome Extension to check the share count from the original URL. This will both give you the real-time share counts for the page as well as instruct our crawlers to add the article to our database.

BuzzSumo follows a sequence of steps to try and discover the publication date when crawling articles.

If we aren't able to determine the correct date of publication, we will use the date we first crawled the article. This may not line up with the date filter you are using. 

We recommend you or your web developer use one of these meta tags in your source code to ensure we attribute the correct date to the article.

BuzzSumo uses an article's canonical URL to attribute shares back to the correct article. If this is incorrect, it can cause issues with the share count and our ability to appropriately crawl the correct article.

To check your canonical URL, right-click on the page (Ctrl-Click on a Mac) and select “View Page Source."

Then, search for it using Ctrl-F (Command+F on a Mac) and entering "canonical" in the search box. 

If the canonical and article URLs are not the same, instruct your developers or SEO to address it immediately.

If your site has identical titles (e.g. HTML title tags: <title>Your Site</title>) that are identical, then we may automatically remove content that appears to be duplicate. 

We recommend working with your marketing team to ensure you are using unique titles across all of your content assets. This will improve not only the accuracy of our crawl but also improve the overall visibility of your content in search.

We commonly see social tags, such as Facebook’s OpenGraph og:url tag implemented incorrectly. Please check your source code and ensure that each og:url tag points to the correct, canonical URL for your pages. If it’s pointing to the wrong content or (as we often see) the homepage, your site may not be crawled correctly.

Large changes to a site’s URL structure (for example, you migrated to a new domain to and have set up many redirects for your older URLs) may result in delays in recrawling your content. We ask that you please allow at least 1-2 months for our crawlers to reindex your content.

As a general rule, URLs shouldn’t change often. If you have a large site and are expecting to make this kind of massive shift, please reach out to our Support team.

It’s possible that your site has been filtered out because our system thinks that it is spam or gaming shares (purchasing likes, tweets, or any other form of social engagement).

We strongly advise against this practice as it may result in action taken by the social networks themselves, up to and including removal of profiles from their systems.

If none of these reasons apply and you are still not seeing the results in BuzzSumo you expect, please let our Support team know so that we may investigate.

Some sites that "gate" content or employ blocking software may prevent our crawlers from indexing articles in our database. Some examples of gated content include:

If you think we may not be indexing a site that wee should, drop us a line. We'd be happy to investigate.