Cheapflights has hit back at research by search marketing agency Greenlight that suggested that it had suffered a 25% drop in search visibility.

The company said it “suspects their source data might be at fault” and that Greenlight may have placed too much importance and weight on the single word “flight”, suggesting it accounts for 59% of all searches.

A spokesman for Cheapflights said: “We respectfully disagree with this weighting and in fact, Cheapflights’ data shows this is a considerable over-estimation and skews the data.

He added: “According to Hitwise figures for last December, the term ‘cheap flights’ drives around 85 times more traffic than ‘flight’. In addition, the term ‘flight’ was not amongst the top 600 plus terms driving traffic to the industry. Only a few years ago the top name associated with the search word ‘flight’ was NASA!”

He added: “Applying Hitwise figures for December to Greenlight’s data would fundamentally change the order of most visible sites. We suspect it would leave Cheapflights.co.uk at or very close to the top of the pile.

“Whilst Cheapflights may not have top visibility for every flight related term, the Company’s attention is focused firmly on the terms that we believe are important for consumers, and consequently Cheapflights continues to enjoy strong visibility across the board.”

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