How to Win Friends and Influence People is the most-searched sales book of 2026, with 497,900 US searches through August
Most Popular Sales Books by Reader Interest. Published October 2026.
A Hollerly ranking of 101 sales, persuasion and negotiation books by US Google searches and Wikipedia readership.
Key findings
- How to Win Friends and Influence People drew 767,520 US Google searches from September 2025 to August 2026, more than twice the 336,310 for second-placed Never Split the Difference.
- Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion is the fastest-rising large title, with searches up 49% in three years to 166,410 a year.
- The Challenger Sale is the most-searched book written specifically about B2B selling, ranking #8 overall with about 4,068 searches a month.
- Wikipedia pageviews for The Challenger Sale rose 78% between October 2022 to September 2023 and October 2025 to September 2026.
- The Science of Selling had the biggest percentage gain among books with a meaningful base, up 99% to 2,940 searches a year.
- Never Split the Difference (+2%) and The Greatest Salesman in the World (+17%) also grew, while 51 of 71 books with a meaningful base saw searches fall.
The most-searched sales books
Reading lists for sales teams tend to repeat the same names. This ranking shows how often people actually look those books up. For each of 101 titles, the total combines US Google searches for the title, the title plus "book", summaries and audiobooks.
Dale Carnegie's 1936 classic is far ahead of the field, with about 63,960 US searches a month. Chris Voss's negotiation book Never Split the Difference is second at about 28,026. Robert Cialdini's Influence is third. Persuasion and negotiation titles take the top spots, which reflects how widely they are read outside sales.
Among books written for B2B sellers, The Challenger Sale leads at #8, ahead of Fanatical Prospecting (#9) and SPIN Selling (#16).
Which books are rising
Most titles lost some search interest over three years. 51 of the 71 books with at least 1,200 searches in the first year declined. A handful grew.
Influence stands out because it grew from an already large base: up 49% to 166,410 searches a year. Among the larger titles, Never Split the Difference (+2%) and The Greatest Salesman in the World (+17%) also gained.
| Rank | Book | Author | Avg. monthly US searches (Sep 2025 to Aug 2026) | Change vs Oct 2022 to Sep 2023 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | How to Win Friends and Influence People | Dale Carnegie | 63,960 | -1% |
| 2 | Never Split the Difference | Chris Voss | 28,026 | +2% |
| 3 | Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion | Robert Cialdini | 13,868 | +49% |
| 4 | Getting to Yes | Roger Fisher, William Ury | 7,194 | -6% |
| 5 | The Greatest Salesman in the World | Og Mandino | 7,126 | +17% |
| 6 | The 10X Rule | Grant Cardone | 5,767 | -1% |
| 7 | The Go-Giver | Bob Burg, John David Mann | 4,462 | -27% |
| 8 | The Challenger Sale | Matthew Dixon, Brent Adamson | 4,068 | +2% |
| 9 | Fanatical Prospecting | Jeb Blount | 3,663 | -17% |
| 10 | Ninja Selling | Larry Kendall | 2,712 | -38% |
| 11 | Sell or Be Sold | Grant Cardone | 1,979 | -19% |
| 12 | Go for No | Richard Fenton, Andrea Waltz | 1,769 | -21% |
| 13 | Way of the Wolf | Jordan Belfort | 1,675 | -26% |
| 14 | Exactly What to Say | Phil M. Jones | 1,453 | -12% |
| 15 | To Sell Is Human | Daniel H. Pink | 1,447 | -23% |
| 16 | SPIN Selling | Neil Rackham | 1,395 | +20% |
| 17 | Hope Is Not a Strategy | Rick Page | 1,381 | -10% |
| 18 | The Trusted Advisor | Maister, Green, Galford | 1,290 | +37% |
| 19 | Smart Calling | Art Sobczak | 1,271 | -26% |
| 20 | $100M Offers | Alex Hormozi | 1,179 | -48% |
Wikipedia readership
Six of the books have their own English Wikipedia article. Pageviews tell a similar story at the top. The Challenger Sale is the exception: its article views rose 78%, even though Google searches for the book were roughly flat (+2%).
| Book | Wikipedia article | Pageviews, Oct 2025 to Sep 2026 | Change vs Oct 2022 to Sep 2023 |
|---|---|---|---|
| How to Win Friends and Influence People | How to Win Friends and Influence People | 272,834 | -20% |
| Getting to Yes | Getting to Yes | 41,660 | +3% |
| Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion | Influence: Science and Practice | 29,795 | -17% |
| The Greatest Salesman in the World | The Greatest Salesman in the World | 28,258 | -25% |
| The Challenger Sale | The Challenger Sale | 13,782 | +78% |
| The Go-Giver | The Go-Giver | 9,566 | -21% |
Hollerly's LinkedIn message automation tool writes each message with AI and follows up on LinkedIn and email until someone replies.
About the data
- Search data: monthly US Google search volume (English), October 2022 to August 2026. "2026" figures cover January to August 2026.
- Books: 101 books on selling, persuasion and negotiation from commonly cited sales reading lists, all with measurable search volume. The full list with every keyword is in the Raw tab.
- Keywords per book: the exact title, title + "book", title + "summary" and title + "audiobook". Where a title is also a methodology name or common phrase (SPIN Selling, The Challenger Sale, Gap Selling, Solution Selling, SNAP Selling, Insight Selling, Inbound Selling, Objections, Virtual Selling, The Machine), only the book-qualified variants count. Close variants that share one grouped volume are counted once.
- Wikipedia data: English Wikipedia monthly page views, all access, human users only, October 2022 to September 2026, for articles about the book itself (not author pages, redirects to author pages or disambiguation pages). Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion redirects to the article "Influence: Science and Practice", which covers the same book.
- One-month spikes: isolated one-month spikes that do not match surrounding months (for example a keyword jumping from about 5,000 to 165,000 searches for a single month) are replaced with the keyword's centered 7-month rolling median when they exceed 4 times that median. Unadjusted values are in the Raw tab of data.xlsx.
- Limitations: search volumes are rounded estimates. Some titles are also everyday phrases (for example The 10X Rule, The Trusted Advisor, Go for No), so their totals may include unrelated searches. Search volume measures interest, not sales or readership. The list is not exhaustive.
Sources
- Monthly US Google search volume (English), October 2022 to August 2026
- English Wikipedia monthly page views, October 2022 to September 2026
Source: Hollerly, Most Popular Sales Books by Reader Interest, October 2026. https://hollerlyai.com/research/most-popular-sales-books
Charts and data are free to use under CC BY 4.0 with a link to this page. Press questions: hello@hollerlyai.com