Public attention to shipping · Thursday 1 October 2026
The Index measures how much attention the public is paying to shipping, day by day — from what people search for, what they read up on, what the press publishes and what they post.
Each day is published once all four signals have reported it — usually by 08:30 UTC the following day. How the timing works.
50 is normal. The average of a period without incidents.
What's driving it
Today · 1 Oct 2026Four signals, weighted. Each dial follows the day you're pointing at in the chart above. The coloured arc is that day's score and the tick marks the baseline. The dial tops out at 300.
Search 30% of the Index
69.4
Google searches — what people went looking for
Research 30% of the Index
39.1
Wikipedia page views — what people read up on
News 20% of the Index
82.2
Media coverage — how much the world's press published
Social 20% of the Index
71.3
X and Bluesky — what people posted about
How to use the Index
Coverage counts tell you what editors published. The Index tells you what the public did — and the split across its four signals tells you what kind of attention you're dealing with. A story running on press coverage that nobody searches for is a different situation from one driving public curiosity ahead of the coverage.
In an incident — understanding the situation. How does public reaction to my incident compare with past incidents? And what does that mean for my comms strategy?
If your incident moves the Index, it's a big deal — but how it moved the Index is more interesting. Did it spike quickly and die away, like the US seizure of a Russian-flagged tanker — back to normal levels in six days — or did it climb and spike repeatedly for months, like the Strait of Hormuz crisis? Was it driven mostly by news coverage, like the Solong–Stena Immaculate collision, or by research — the public going out and reading more about our industry — like the Ever Given?
Even incidents that never move the whole Index leave a mark in the underlying signals. Piracy stories, for example, tend to show up in the coverage and on social media but rarely motivate people to search for more information. Stories about LNG and other gas carriers, on the other hand, do drive follow-up questions.
When managing communications for an incident, knowing from the data whether a story is likely to spike — and where that spike is likely to come from — gives communicators the chance to prepare and meet their audiences where they are going to be.
The incident file holds every incident since 2020 that left a mark in the Index or in the series beneath it, each broken into the signals that carried it and how long the attention took to fade. That is the context a live judgement rests on.
Browse the incidents → For a live or recent incident, get in touch →
When attention is high — opportunity and exposure. A high Index means the media and the public are primed to notice maritime stories. That's either a warning or an opportunity, depending on the story you have to tell.
When the Index runs high, editors are commissioning shipping stories and the public is reading them — and not only the stories most obviously driving the spike. That leaves you three positions. Seize the moment! Have a story you want noticed? Now is your chance. Hold off — have some questionable news you'd rather had limited reach? Maybe now's not the time to announce it. Or have no plan — maybe the world will leave you alone, maybe it'll come knocking.
In the quiet stretches — how should our industry keep telling its story? Ours is an attention-shy industry. Many companies are happier out of the headlines, but that comes with its own risks.
We focus, of course, on the spikes — but most days the Index shows the opposite problem: an industry carrying the overwhelming share of world trade that doesn't get much attention. Anyone arguing that shipping deserves the public's attention — for its people, its careers, its role in stocking every shelf ashore — needs evidence of the gap between what the industry does and what the world sees. The Index measures that gap every day, and the incident file shows how briefly even the biggest stories hold it open.
The Index is compiled and edited by Dustin Eno, a crisis communications specialist who has spent his career advising shipowners, operators and insurers through the incidents that put the industry on the front page. About the Index →
The number is free, daily. Every month, a letter from Dustin Eno on what it means.
A short letter on how the world is paying attention to shipping, and what that means for the people managing it — plus the occasional flash when the Index does something worth knowing about.
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