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Phonely led the race. Then 99% of its visits vanished.

Goodcall now grabs nearly 9 in 10 Google visits, yet name searches are quietly rising.

Written by Miles Foster, Owner and tester, RankDude. / 2 min read

A year ago, Phonely got more visits from Google than any other AI receptionist site. Now it gets about 1,300 a month, RankDude data shows. Goodcall took the crown, and it is not sharing. But that's not the strange part.

The short version

  • -99.5%: Phonely's drop in visits from Google in a year.
  • 9 in 10: Goodcall's share of all those visits.
  • -34%: the whole market's visits in one month.
  • +30%: US searches for the brands by name.

WorldPhonely's visits from Google

0125K250K375K500KOct 25Dec 25Feb 26Apr 26Jun 26Sep 261.3K
Low 1.3KHigh 294KAverage 126K
Hover, tap, or use the arrow keys to inspect a month

Visits fell off a cliff in June 2026. Source: RankDude analysis of DataForSEO data.

The big crash

In September 2025, Phonely had about 265,000 visits from Google. A year later it had 1,279.

Most of it went in one month. Visits fell from about 173,000 in May 2026 to about 16,500 in June.

Here's the odd timing. Phonely raised a US$16 million Series A led by Base10 Partners, with Y Combinator taking part, Startup Daily reported in April 2026.

Two months later, its visits from Google had dropped by more than 90%.

Why? I have not found a reliable source that says, so I won't guess. And people still look for it. US searches for the name hit 1,900 in September, up from 1,600 last October.

So where did all those visits go?

Meet the new boss

Goodcall got about 406,000 of the roughly 457,000 visits from Google to AI receptionist sites in September. That's nearly 9 in 10.

It is up 89.9% on a year ago. Bob Summers, a former Google executive, founded it. It raised a $4 million seed round in 2021, TechCrunch reported.

The top five sites hold 98% of all visits. Everyone else fights over crumbs.

The next most visited site, ServiceAgent, had about 17,500 visits. It grew fast, up 74.6% in a month. Still, that's less than a twentieth of Goodcall. See every site in the AI receptionist statistics.

But even the boss had a rough month.

The numbers

Goodcall's share of visitsSeptember 2026
89%
Phonely, in one yearin 12 months
-99.5%
US searches by brand nameon a year ago
+30%

The plot twist

Total visits fell 33.6% in one month, from about 688,000 to about 457,000. Back in April 2026 they peaked near 1.44 million.

That drop is almost all Goodcall. It lost about 240,000 visits. The whole market lost only about 231,000.

Leave Goodcall out, and the other sites actually grew 20.8% that month.

Now the twist. US searches for the brands by name reached 16,210 in September, up 30.1% on a year ago.

I think interest is still growing. Google just sends it to fewer sites. If you're picking a tool to answer your calls, you'll meet very few names. Watch the trend on the demand page.

“When one site gets nine in ten visits, its bad month looks like everyone's.”

Miles Foster

How I measured this

These are DataForSEO estimates of monthly visits from Google search, worldwide. Name searches are monthly US volumes from Google Ads data. I have not tested Goodcall, Phonely or any other AI receptionist yet, and my methodology page has the details.

Source: RankDude analysis of DataForSEO data, September 2026.

On this site

Sources

  1. TechCrunch, “Goodcall picks up $4M, Yelp partnership to answer merchant inbound calls”, 1 September 2021.
  2. Startup Daily, “Y Combinator-backed AI call receptionist raises $22 million Series A”, 15 April 2026.

Figures about the sites I track come from RankDude’s own monthly data (DataForSEO, Google Ads keyword data, Tranco, Google Chrome UX Report, Ahrefs, SerpApi and Google Trends); the figures here are for September 2026, published 15 October 2026, next update 1 November 2026. Each tool is explained on the testing tools pages. Reported facts about other companies are as published by the sources above.

Miles FosterOwner and tester, RankDude. Miles Foster owns RankDude and runs every hands-on test in person: one written procedure per category, the same sample sizes and scoring for every tool in it, with the measurements and screenshots published on each review's full test results.

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