Back in the spring of 2017, I wrote that HTTPS results made up half of page-one[1] Google organic URLs. In over three years, I haven't posted an update, which might lead you to believe that nothing changed. The reality is that a whole lot changed, but it changed so gradually that there was never a single event or clear "a-ha!" moment to write about.
Now, in the fall of 2020, HTTPS URLs make up 98% of page-one organic results in the MozCast 10,000-keyword tracking set. Here's the monthly growth since April 2017:
There was a bump in HTTPS after October 2017, when Google announced that Chrome would be displaying more warnings to users for non-secure forms[2], but otherwise forward momentum has been fairly steady. While browsers have continued to raise the stakes, there have been no announced or measured algorithm updates regarding HTTPS.
I scoff at your data!
So, why am I writing this update now? While the MozCast 10,000-keyword set is well-suited for tracking long-term trends (as it's consistent over time and has a long history), the data is focused on page-one, desktop results and is intentionally skewed toward more competitive terms.
Recently, I've been gifted access to our anonymized STAT[3] ranking data — 7.5M keywords across desktop and mobile. Do these trends hold across devices, more pages, and more keywords?
The table above is just the page-one data. Across a much larger data set, the prevalence of HTTPS URLs on page one is very similar to MozCast and nearly identical across desktop and mobile. Now, let's expand to the top 50 organic results (broken up into groups of ten) ...
Even at the tail end of the top 50 organic results, more than 92% of URLs are HTTPS. There does seem