Granular analysis of Google search data sheds light into how dog owners think and what issues they are struggling the most with today
Our relationship with our dogs can be one of the most important, fulfilling parts of life. The 2021 American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) pet owner survey showed a staggering 97% of US owners see their dog as a family member;[1] and, to the extent that budget reflects the role pets play in our lives, average household pet spend has nearly doubled in the last decade,[2] even while ownership itself has grown at twice the rate of population growth.[3]
There are times, however, when dogs can also be the predominant source of stress in an owner’s life. As we highlighted in previous analyses (1, 2), many owners lack some of the foundational knowledge and skills necessary to raise, care for, understand, and interact with their puppy or adult dog in a consistently healthy, effective manner. As a result, when a dog suffers from a behavioral or health issue, their guardian can struggle to understand what is going on, why it’s happening, and how to address it. The result is stressed, emotionally exhausted owners looking desperately for ways to help their loved one.
Not knowing where to turn, most owners end up either searching Google or posting to one of the hundreds of Facebook Groups for dog owner questions. Unfortunately both sources tend to steer them towards bad – often even damaging – guidance from unvetted or amateur sources. Interviewing hundreds of owners, we found that consistent pattern: running into a problem, not knowing where to start, and ending up with poor guidance from unreliable sources, leaving them only more stressed and confused than when they started.
While deleterious from a canine welfare perspective, those owner searches and posts provide valuable insight into what owners are struggling with today: what most concerns the average dog owner? What is top of mind? What are they struggling with? What are they looking for? That information is important not only for dog professionals and NGOs looking to improve outcomes for dogs, but also pet industry stakeholders in marketing, product, and strategy looking to better serve owners in improving their lives with their dogs.
To pursue that understanding, we have conducted a detailed, granular analysis of dog owner Google search data in the United States for the year-long period from October 2023 to October 2024 (Chart 1). Through trainer interviews, we constructed a list of 74 of some of the most common “target issues” across behavior, health, husbandry, handling, and sourcing; for each of them, we then sought to identify all relevant, independent Google ‘keywords’ related to that issue, each reflecting the search algorithm’s assignment of user ‘search intent’ (see ‘methodology’ section at the end for more details). That bottom-up analysis – and the observations that follow – provide both a rich and population-scale view into how owners think, and what they need, today.
Observation 1: Owners are struggling, and looking for answers
Before diving into what owners are struggling with, it’s worth noting the scale of the need. Across just the issues we identified, at least 7.4 million dog owners every month, or roughly 1 in every 10 dog households, are struggling with something and searching for answers.
While that scale is daunting, it is also an opportunity:
- There is massive demand for knowledge and information – owners are concerned, and are looking for answers
- That creates an opportunity to provide education – to guide owners down a path to becoming more knowledgeable, more capable, more confident handlers
If we can intercept these struggling owners, we have a chance to close some of the endemic gaps in dog owner knowledge.
From a commercial or institutional perspective, this reflects an emerging market need for a consistent, easy-to-access, and reliable place to turn for dog handling knowledge and information. Historically, the $150 bn US pet industry has been dominated by spend on food and merchandise.[2] Over the past two decades, however, not only has ownership expanded rapidly – growing at twice the rate of population growth – but our relationship with dogs has changed. People are getting dogs (i) earlier (and having kids later), (ii) for different reasons (companionship, rather than ‘for the kids’), (iii) in different environments (urbanization increasing share of city dogs), and (iv) with different expectations (wanting to take their dog more places, include them in more activities). We are more invested in our dogs, both financially and emotionally, than ever.
These shifts in the nature of ownership put increased demands on our dogs at the same time as our care for and attentiveness to their needs has grown. The end result is, we believe, an unmet demand for a ‘dog knowledge industry’ on par in scale and depth with the pet food and pet merchandise industries. There is already an incredible educational ecosystem – with many high-quality introductory books, videos, online courses, and in-person classes, including repositories from incredible organizations like the AKC, Fear-Free, our own at Good Owners, and many others. These resources tend to lack centralization and distribution, however, on the scale of what you would see from the likes of PetCo, PetSmart, or Chewy in the merchandise space; Mars or Nestle Purina in food; or Trupanion or Nationwide in insurance. Owners today predominantly turn to Google or Facebook for answers because there is no established “first stop” or “everything in one place” dog knowledge brand **in their minds.
As the data shows us, addressing that demand is a tremendous opportunity to improve outcomes for owners and dogs, but would require two things:
- Targeting owner concerns – as we see in Chart 1, owners are looking for insight when they face a problem. Intercepting them at that moment is the opportunity window to draw them into a longer learning journey.
- Getting on their radar – it is not enough to have the answers to their concern, you need them to come to you for answers; to be effective, a knowledge platform needs owners to think of it as the place to go when they have an issue. That requires an extensive but focused branding and awareness effort.
As the data in Chart 1 shows, achieving those goals to become a central ‘knowledge brand’ in the mind of the average dog owner would allow an institution to connect with and have a tremendous positive impact on the lives of many millions of dog owners every day. Achieving that of course is our mission at Good Owners, but given the nascent demand we imagine more institutions will continue to invest in ‘cracking’ this space.
Observation 2: Behavioral issues and training are big concerns
It is no surprise to see several health and husbandry issues – toxins, GI problems, cancer, grooming, diet, and supplements – at the top of the list; these are fundamental logistical needs no pet parent can ignore – feeding, grooming, and dealing with serious illness.
More surprising perhaps is that issues of behavior and training have become similarly top-of-mind for even your average, ‘non-enthusiast’ dog owner.
8 of the top 20 concerns for owners are on behavior (barking, anxiety, and fear / reactivity / aggression), training (”obedience,” collar/lead selection, crate/crate training, potty training), or sourcing (breed choice). Those 8 issues on their own account for nearly a third of all searches.
That suggests an encouraging dynamic: even for your ‘casual,’ mainstream dog owner, behavior, training, nurturing, and handling are top-tier concerns, on par with food and health. Even if the average baseline knowledge isn’t where we’d like it to be, the initial interest and motivation to learn more is there, if we can tap into it.
Observation 3: Owners care deeply about the emotional and physical well-being of their dogs
The data in Chart 1 add further evidence to the trend highlighted both anecdotally and qualitatively in the introduction: owners are tremendously emotionally invested in their dogs. 13 of the top 20 issues, coming from over 3 million owners per month, were on health or behavioral topics germane to only the dog’s welfare (as opposed to potentially the owner’s convenience, such as “obedience training” or “crates,” or basic logistics, such as “food/diet choice” or “coats & grooming”).[5] In other words, owners on average are devoting the same or more mental space to their dog’s welfare as they do to their own logistics and convenience.
That finding is consistent with not only macroscopic data on owner-dog perceptions and spend (see introduction), but also these owners’ next step: seeking answers, hundreds of thousands every day turn to Facebook Groups for dog owner questions. Browsing those queries not only corroborates what we see in the search data, it also provides qualitative color on owners’ experience and mentality (see Figure 1). Browsing those posts, it becomes clear that these struggling owners are often stressed, desperate, and emotionally exhausted. They have been desperately seeking answers, getting conflicting guidance from resources they have no toolkit for evaluating, and nothing they try seems to work (or makes the situation worse).
This prevalent negative experience of dog owners, while deeply concerning, is also encouraging: although owners may not know what to do or where to get good information, millions of them clearly care enough to try to seek it. As we can see however, unfortunately, many of them are not finding their way to strong resources.
Observation 4: Knowledge and product exploration often go hand-in-hand
Drilling down into the ‘keywords’ underlying each of the issues in Chart 1, we find that there is an intimate connection between owners’ search for knowledge and search for ‘product solutions.’ You see that, for example, across:
- Care, handling, training tools – e.g., searching for different collar and harness types as part of trying to address leash-pulling challenges; choosing the right nail care tools and grooming services; understanding clicker tools for training; or understanding coat and jacket needs for heat, cold, rain, hiking, or other situations
- Food & nutrition – e.g., choosing the right food for your dog; supplements and probiotic options for general health; or dietary and supplement approaches to address joint, allergy, or gastrointestinal problems
- Medicine – understanding pharmaceutical options for pain management, anxiety, joint problems, and other ailments
Owners’ search journeys make it clear that we cannot disaggregate the product, service, and knowledge journeys from one another, they are co-dependent and best served together.
Observation 5: Owners tend to look for solutions, when what they really need is diagnostics
Although it varies by issue, the majority of owner searches are reactionary, looking for a solution to a manifesting problem rather than understanding its root causes.
That is problematic, because as any experienced trainer can tell you, you need to understand why a dog is doing something before even beginning to think about how to address. To effectively treat or manage a dog’s “issue,” whether it is barking at strangers, jumping on guests, or pottying in the house, you need to diagnose the underlying source of the behavior, as different root causes demand very different approaches and solutions. If you try using compulsion to get a fearful dog to stop barking at guests, for example, you’re only going to suppress the behavior, increasing their anxiety and creating a potential powder keg. If your terrier is going nuts in your city apartment, it might not be from lack of activity – it could be rodents in your halls; hours of fetch in a field won’t help. If your dog’s diarrhea is due to a giardia infection, switching foods isn’t going to help.
Unfortunately what we see in the data is that most owners’ first impulse is to look for solutions – rather than trying to understand the root cause. This often manifests in the form of the underlying keyword end nodes. For example:
- Keywords associated with dog-dog reactivity and aggression “training” have around 12,000 average queries per month, while variants of “why is my dog aggressive towards other dogs” number under 1,000.
- Keywords related to how to stop dogs barking total around 60,000 average monthly queries, while those related to why my dog is barking are around 6,000.
- Compared to over 110,000 monthly queries on puppy potty training, there are under 1,000 related in any way to understanding why a puppy may be having accidents.
There is a notable set of exceptions: health-related queries, such as gastrointestinal problems, corprophagia, and pain, as well as those tied to anxiety and depression, tend to elicit more “what/why is this happening” queries than “how do I fix it” ones.
Even so, the data supports what many trainers have learned first-hand: as a trainer – or knowledge resource – you need to start by showing clients the importance of diagnosing an issue before trying to treat it. ****Owners often come in – understandably – with a ‘how do I fix this’ mentality, and need help recalibrating before guiding them to a solution.
The implication for institutions is that any effective knowledge platform must first guide owners to “why” even when they come in asking “how.”
Observation 6: The average owner initially focuses on training and “obedience” as a solution, rather than understanding or meeting their dog’s biological needs
A second disconnect between the average owner’s mentality and the reality of behavioral biology is in the role and definition of “training.” Often, a dog’s ‘behavioral issues’ are rooted in unmet mental, physical, or social needs. A high-energy dog may be bouncing off the walls because they’re not getting enough activity, not because they are a ‘bad dog;’ a dog suffering from anxiety may be chewing on furniture because they are stressed and need more coping outlets, not because they haven’t be ‘taught to behave;’ a dog home alone may be barking all day because of separation anxiety, not because they’re ‘disobedient.’
In many cases there can be a complementary training component (e.g., unintentional reinforcement of unwanted behaviors or punishment of desirable behaviors, self-reinforcing behaviors, insufficient development of confidence or self-control, etc.), but those are generally a matter of changing owner behavior, not ‘getting the dog in line.’
The data shows however that the overwhelming majority of owners do not understand their dog’s biological needs, or the role they play in behavior, and instead naively seek “training” solutions. For example:
- There are over 500,000 searches per month on general/obedience training, compared to less than 10,000 combined relating to under-stimulation, hyperactivity, or providing a dog with sufficient physical activity.
- Out of over 180,000 searches per month related to barking, nearly all of them are tied to “how to stop” dog barking, with only around 6,000 related to why a dog may be barking.
- Of dog aggression- and reactivity-related searches, at least 28,000 per month explicitly ask about training, compared to only 11,000 in the more general keywords.
Although misguided, we do not believe the average owner’s impulse to ‘fix’ their dog is a result of selfishness or cruelty; there is plenty of evidence – see Observation 3 – that most owners care sincerely about their dogs. Rather, our hypothesis is that this problem is rooted in pervasive cultural misconceptions about dogs: the common cultural narrative – and therefore the mental model most owners have – is that dogs either “behave” or “don’t behave.” We tend to not think about their perspective – what context do they have, or not have? What are their physical, mental, and social needs? We rarely appreciate that they are sophisticated, individual being with rich inner lives and most of the same mental and social architecture that we possess.
In other words, we suggest this may be an issue of our cultural perception of dogs, rather than a deliberate selfish, authoritarian desire to control one’s dog.
The implication is that any effective knowledge resource must show owners the connection between their dog’s biological needs and their behavior.
Observation 7: There is a big gap between what we talk about in the professionals community and where the bulk of owners are at
Most trainers and dog professionals understandably base their perception of dog owners off their first-hand experience. What we can forget, however, is that the owners one sees as trainers are actually the most engaged, informed owners out there. As we highlighted in past work, as many as 95% of dog owners never go to a single class or work with a trainer. The most popular training and puppy-raising books ever printed (e.g., Pryor’s Don’t shoot the dog, Dunbar’s Before & after getting a puppy, or the Monks of New Skete’s How to be your dog’s best friend) are able to sell a few hundred thousand copies over decades – as compared to a population of around 90 million dog owners in the US at any given time*.*
In other words, the mental model many training professionals have for the ‘average’ dog owner is, in actuality, a ‘top 5%’ dog owner in terms of how informed and engaged they are. The result, we believe, is that most dog professionals significantly over-estimate how much most owners know about dog behavior, needs, biology, health, etc.
That shows up starkly in the search data; a few examples:
- There are around 40,000 searches per month on how to trim dog nails alone, but only 260 related to cooperative care of any kind.
- There are over 500,000 searches per month on picking a breed, but less than 4,000 per month combined on what to consider when choosing a breeder, a rescue, or debating between adopting vs. buying.
- There are over 50,000 monthly queries on puppy training, but only around 13,000 on socialization (a far more important factor in their lifestyle behavior and healthy psychological development).
- Puppy owners haven’t even heard of “nipping” – out of nearly 40,000 monthly queries on puppy biting, only a few hundred use the word “nipping” (the rest all ask why my puppy is biting me). That suggests owners haven’t even heard of the phenomenon, and are confused as to why their puppy is ‘biting’ or ‘aggressing’ them.
- With around 22,000 monthly searches for “off leash dog parks,” there are barely 10 searches per month on whether, how, when, or why you should allow your dog off-leash.
In other words, many of the topics that occupy an outsized role in the professional training community’s psychology and discourse, often around comparatively nuanced differences in philosophy and methods, are a step or two or more beyond where most owners are at. For example, it is difficult to discuss what breeds or dogs may be appropriate for an owner’s lifestyle when they aren’t even aware that breed effects a dog’s needs or temperament (as opposed to purely aesthetics); or to discuss the importance of using positive reinforcement methods when they don’t yet realize that how they interact with their dog even effects their dog’s learning and behavior. That doesn’t mean such topics aren’t important; it just means that there is a core foundational base of understanding – on how to even think about a dog, as a sophisticated creature with a rich inner life who has emotions, agency, needs, and biases – that must be communicated first.
That is an important potential disconnect, because many of the fantastic educational resources today, which are built, by nature, within perhaps a ‘dog professional bubble,’ may either not be reaching owners, or not at their level. That may help explain why such huge volumes of them are turning to Google and Facebook for answers (and demonstrably failing to find effective guidance), despite the extensive ecosystem of validated learning resources out there.
We call this the pipeline problem: before we can concern ourselves with how owners approach handling, training, care, and communication with their dog, we need to get more of them to recognize the possibility of, need for, and benefits to learning in the first place. In other words, we need to first get owners into the ‘educational ecosystem.’ In ethnographic interviews, we found the overwhelming majority of owners weren’t even aware of the existence of basic concepts like socialization, separation anxiety, breed effects, or reinforcement. To most, ‘training’ is a hobby where you teach your dog party tricks and ‘activity’ is taking your dog for a walk around the block once or twice a day. In other words, they don’t know what they don’t know.
For any institution hoping to educate dog owners, the implication is that it is crucial to meet owners where they are at, in at least two ways:
- Content – Content needs to start at their level, focusing first on showing them what dogs are – how to think about their relationship with dogs – before trying to teach approaches or techniques.
- Channels – We need to reach the overwhelming majority of owners that aren’t going to trainers, classes, or books today. That means finding broader points in the dog ownership journey – such as when they adopt a dog – to reach them.
Conclusion: owners want answers; we need to find effective ways to provide them
Ultimately, the data show:
- Owners are struggling tremendously – whether with behavior, health, or basic care, owners don’t know what to do. Over 7.4 million owners every month are turning to Google searches and Facebook groups for answers – and generally getting terrible responses.
- But they care tremendously, and want to learn – owners care more than ever, emotionally and financially, about their dogs; 97% consider their dog a member of the family (up 15 percentage points in 8 years), while average household spend has nearly doubled. It is no surprise then that when they struggle with a health or behavioral issue, they are looking for answers, in enormous volumes.
- We have a responsibility to mee them where they’re at – using data like the above to understand their psychology and how they are thinking about problems, there is an opportunity to intercept and guide them towards better answers. That requires creating platforms and ‘dog knowledge brands’ on par in scale and depth with what we have in the pet food, merchandise, and insurance spaces.
Meeting the blossoming demand for more and more accessible information on dog handling and care is a daunting challenge, but also a tremendous opportunity.
Methodology
Interviews to collect expert insights from trainers, vets, and other pet professionals can be richly informative, but are necessarily skewed towards the clients that come to see them. In a world where as many as 95% of dog owners never go to a class or see a trainer,[3] it is important to get a more comprehensive view. To develop a true population-scale understanding of what is on owners’ minds, we conducted a granular analysis of Google search data in the United States for the year-long period from October 2023 to October 2024 (Chart 1). We did so by first constructing a list of 74 of some of the most common “target issues” across behavior, health, husbandry, handling, and sourcing, for example: leash-pulling, joint issues, diet/food choice, coats & grooming, and exercise. Constructed through trainer interviews, the list prioritizes broad coverage of behavioral and training matters, but still endeavors to include prevailing health issues. Because the search data derives from the owners perspective, not the actual underlying problem, different issues with often-confused outward presentations had to be combined (for example: reactivity, fear, and forward-aggression). For each “target issue,” we then sought to identify all relevant, independent Google ‘keywords’ related to that issue, each reflecting the search algorithm’s assignment of user “search intent.”[4] This process of identifying keywords is by definition bottoms-up, and therefore will generally be an undercount of the number of actual searches for the target issue. These numbers therefore provide a reliable lower bound on the (monthly) population of owners interested in each of these subjects. See endnote 4 for more information on methodology.
References
[1] American Veterinary Medical Association, 2021 Annual Pet Ownership and Demographic Survey
[2] American Pet Products Association Annual Pet Owners Survey; Bureau of Labor Statistics
[3] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/pipeline-problem-how-were-getting-fewer-owners-educational-efzle/
[4] Methodology Notes: ‘Keywords’ – like “how do I train my dog” or “puppy pad” – are how Google classifies searches and matches them to destinations (webpages that are likely to satisfy the user, and therefore should be served). Keywords can be compound nouns, like “dog bloat,” or phrases, like “signs of bloat in dogs” or “how to treat dog bloat.” Keywords are not semantically hierarchical, i.e. more general keywords, like “potty training puppy” can actually return fewer results than more specific keywords, like “how to potty train a puppy.” Instead, Google creates and classifies Keywords based on “user intent” – what information it believes a user wants to see (presumably empirically identified through what they actually click on). Keywords can be more or less dependent on one another – i..e. have varying degrees of overlap in what searches they contain (because one search can be matched to multiple keywords). Those two factors can lead to fascinating divergences and insight into human psychology. For example, “dog depression symptoms” and “how to tell if my dog is depressed” can lead to entirely different results, even though they are semantically very close. To determine the number of monthly searches tied a given “target issue” however, one must identify all the independent (i.e. minimally-overlapping) keywords associated with that issue. Because that is a manual process of trial-and-error, it is impossible to find every keyword associated with an issue, leading to general undercounts in our methods (although non-zero overlap between keywords, despite our best efforts to maximize independence, can lead to countervailing double-counting).
A note on monthly numbers: we focused on monthly averages over a year-long period to (a) remove seasonal variation, and (b) identify independent searches, as opposed to recurring problems. To get annual populations, you cannot multiply monthly numbers by 12, because some recurring population exists. Based on several hundred qualitative interviews with dog owners conducted in prior work, we estimate recurring searches to account for somewhere between a fifth and a half of all searches, so we would expect true annual numbers to be between 2x and 6x the monthly figure.
For more details on methodology, contact the authors at darin@goodowners.dog or raja@goodowners.dog.
[5] Furthermore, many of the ‘potentially owner-centric’ searches could actually be dog-centric. For example, searches related to “coats and grooming”
