Ongoing debates in Washington DC regarding the debt ceiling have captured the interest of Americans as many struggle to understand the overall impact. Search activity has been building over the past 5 weeks and variations of ‘debt ceiling’ jumped 232% for the week ending July 16, 2011 as compared to the prior week. Last week, ‘debt ceiling’ ranked first among all search variations including the keyword ‘debt’.

The variations themselves highlight consumer interest in understanding ‘what is the debt ceiling’, the history of debt ceiling increases and general updates. Potential outcomes regarding the economy, social security and unemployment benefits are also top of mind. There has been particular interest in Obama’s current and previous views on the debt ceiling along with history of raising the debt ceiling in relation to previous Presidents including Bush, Clinton, Reagan and Nixon.


News & Media websites are the main recipients of debt ceiling searches with the exception of the Yahoo! portal. Over the past 4 weeks, Yahoo!, CNNMoney.com and The Washington Post have captured 30% of the search clicks related to the debt ceiling.