Future of surveys: What our platform says about 2025

As a product leader, there are some real upsides to having 25 years of history built into our platform. Over more than two decades, 93 billion questions have been answered on our platform, with over 25 million answered daily. In those questions lie important learnings about survey trends, but more importantly, we find insights into the preferences, expectations, and priorities of people around the world. 

We use these learnings to inform our product roadmap. However, history is not the only indicator of the future—how could we have predicted the impact of new developments, like AI, that will reshape how we work, communicate, and navigate information? That’s where a healthy dose of intuition—backed by a real understanding of customer needs and market insights—and experimentation is needed.

We looked at data from our platform in the past year and uncovered important insights into survey trends, which we published in our State of Surveys report for 2025. We took those learnings and added our predictions about what will elevate surveys for our customers this year. Read on to get an inside look at our top findings and a sneak peek into our product roadmap.

The mobile experience is really important, especially if you’re trying to reach younger generations, who are more inclined to operate from their phones than a desktop. The US has lagged behind the rest of the world in sending mobile surveys, but in 2024, that changed—over half of our US response data came from mobile. 

At first glance, this shift might seem like a natural outcome of more people working on mobile devices. However, it's important to know that it also impacts how people expect surveys to look—and how survey creators will need to build surveys in the future. 

Our data shows that our customers are sending more streamlined surveys and taking extra care in how their surveys will look on a mobile device.

For example, the use of matrix questions, a format that packs a lot of answers into one question, has declined by 43% since 2015, while the use of skip logic questions has almost doubled since 2019. Skip logic creates a custom path through the survey that is tailored to the respondent. It’s also tied to higher completion dates—and better quality data.

It makes sense that both of these trends are tied to the increase in mobile surveys; short, sweet, and streamlined are our top best practices for survey creators who want to improve their response rates with mobile users.

Mobile best practices also apply to creating a survey on your phone. Sending a survey from mobile is a great way to capture data in the moment—at a venue, in a store or restaurant, or when a time-sensitive event occurs. There are a lot of apps to make this happen, but we believe mobile survey generation will get a real boost from AI.

Speaking of AI—and everyone is—we’ve again turned to our platform to gather data on survey structure, question content, and respondent behaviors to inform our AI product strategy. 

Today, our customers can harness generative AI using Build with AI and use a pre-written AI prompt, or write their own, to generate a customized survey in less than 30 seconds. The survey can be refined by additional prompts or edited directly to customize it for any situation.

We had a strong sense that our new AI features were going to add a lot of value to our customer experience. We had data that showed our customers were interested in AI, but it’s up to us to figure out where it can provide the most value. Our North Star is to help our customers collect high-quality data, so we wanted to improve that process by making it faster, more streamlined, and accurate.  We knew our decades of expertise and usage history would come into play.

AI has been part of our product for years. Our goal has always been to embed AI throughout the product in the most meaningful ways. We went with our convictions and added AI to our survey creation flow.

It became one of the most used survey creation methods on our platform. So, we doubled down and created a work stream to focus on it, and kept improving the product. 

Going back to the challenge of creating a survey on mobile; we believe AI will completely transform this process. Typing questions on your phone is doable, but typing or speaking a prompt to generate questions and answer options streamlines and optimizes that process.

We combined our customer insights with experimentation to build AI capabilities that are incredibly useful and amplify the value of our platform. AI allows our customers to build high-quality surveys based on recommendations for questions, answer options, survey design improvements, and the best collection methods. All that in under a minute is a pretty good outcome. 

That’s where having access to a platform that is so widely used allows us to understand what’s next, and act on the signals we get from a qualitative and quantitative standpoint.

Speaking of experimentation, this is where we have a real advantage in the market. The scale and usage history of our platform gives us the ability to try things out before we introduce them on a broad scale. That's a big luxury in this industry—every day our platform supports thousands of customers creating surveys, and collects millions of responses. That’s a lot of scale, and that scale helps us to collect a high volume of data and learn quickly. 

Every quarter we introduce just under a hundred experiments to our customers. Some of them are feature rollouts where we introduce something new and collect feedback on how it’s working. We’re able to collect data in a very short timeframe, compared to industry standards, and find out how a feature is working in the real world.

For example, we heard that our customers needed to analyze multiple surveys at the same time so they could do things like longitudinal analysis, and compare data across different surveys. Based on this feedback, we launched our first iteration of multi-survey analysis to a limited audience and gathered their feedback. 

We paid close attention to how customers were using this new feature and made important updates to the user experience—plus added to the capabilities we had prioritized for the full-feature rollout. We then optimized the feature based on all the signals from our customers and launched multi-survey analysis to all users in October 2024. And, we've been getting lots of positive feedback since then!

So while we can’t predict the future, we do have some upcoming developments on our radar that we’re excited about.

As we mentioned above, we’re looking at the mobile experience both from the standpoint of making our surveys more streamlined for mobile responses, and easier for the survey sender to create on mobile. We believe AI, plus capabilities like talk-to-text, will help transform this experience for both survey senders and takers.

We’re already starting to test new themes to see what our customers prefer. The goal is to offer more modern and simplified experiences that will make survey creation a more intuitive experience. AI will also play a role here, incorporating logic, ideal question types, and answer formats that make for a more efficient and productive survey.

Making a survey a part of every web experience should be a goal, but it’s important to have that option show up at the right moment. We’re testing out new capabilities to determine when and how a survey prompt pops up or is a passive option, to better align with a user’s intention when they visit a web page. 

There’s a lot more coming in 2025. Stay on top of our latest developments at the What’s New feature page, or check out upcoming webinars for more product news. 

Rise in mobile: Data for device usage was collected between November 2020 to September 2024, with tablet/other device usage included but not shown. Device usage is calculated by dividing the number of survey responses taken on a specific device by the total number of responses submitted on the SurveyMonkey platform. 

Matrix question usage: Data on matrix questions was collected between January 2024 and September 2024. Percentages are calculated by dividing the number of surveys with matrix questions by the total number of surveys fielded on the SurveyMonkey platform. 

Skip logic usage: Data on skip logic was collected between January 2024 and September 2024. Percentages are calculated by dividing the number of surveys with skip logic by the total number of surveys fielded on the SurveyMonkey platform.