For millennials it was in the back of magazines, for Gen-Z it was Buzzfeed, every generation has their “quiz moment” and that’s been the case for a really long time. Before we started Interact, I looked backwards to see how many decades this pattern had persisted, and I found it was at least 300 years, tracing back to pub quiz nights in Ireland in the 1700’s.
The reaso why quizzes never go anywhere is because they appeal to very fundamental human needs. The need to be heard, the need to self actualize. Questions you get asked in a quiz let you express yourself, the outcomes at the end let you learn about yourself. And people have always wanted those two things.
How this relates to the paradigm in 2026 is that now people want to hear from other people who are experts. They want to see quizzes made by someone who has 10 years of expertise in their field. The last round where quizzes were on Buzzfeed was just for fun, but today we don’t want fun, we want answers.
The shift towards practical advice happened in about 2023 and has continued on until now. What I’m seeing be super popular today are quizzes that help you solve problems you face in your everyday life which feel really terrible.
For example, you’ve got Michelle Shapiro’s Are You Living in a Highly Sensitive Body? Quiz that helps you identify if you are living in a highly sensitive body, and then offers up recommendations if you are.
Then you’ve got Advice With Erin’s Career Type quiz that helps you identify the right career for who you are, in response to her audience feeling like they are in the wrong career and consantly expressing that feeling to her over DMs and in live events.
Then you’ve got Dr. Sasha Hamdani’s “What’s Your Biggest ADHD Roadblock?” quiz that does exactly what it says it does.
What all these quizzes have in common is they answer a question the audience wants to know the answer to. Seems obvious, but knowing what your audience wants from you is a skill that only gets developed over time. And then you have to have the audience, which all three of those examples get from their Instagram followers, which is the most common place where traffic comes in to quizzes these days.
This third wave of internet quizzes will be marked by people who have deep expertise in a certain area using the format of a quiz to answer a key question from their audience in a way that feels deeply personal and helpful.