Every month, hundreds of thousands of people type a tracking status into Google because the page their carrier gave them did not explain it. A large share of those searches now reach pango.ai, which publishes plain-language explainers for more than 300 carrier and marketplace statuses. That gives us something most delivery data lacks: a live, large sample of the questions shoppers actually have, by carrier, by status and by country. This is the first monthly edition.
Short answer: In the 28 days to 1 October 2026, pango.ai's explainers received 489,758 search impressions from real, non-brand queries, up from 255,223 in the previous 28 days. Four out of five of those searches are a shopper asking what a status means; one in six is asking how long something will take. SHEIN generates more tracking-status searches than any carrier except Poste Italiane's English-language tracking, and "out for delivery" is the single most searched status, followed by customs clearance, which tripled in a month.
How the index is built
The numbers are Google Search Console impressions for pango.ai's resources pages over 28 complete days, compared with the 28 days before. Three filters are applied before anything is counted: queries that name Pango are removed; machine-generated queries (AI agents' fan-out prompts, scraper strings) are removed with the same rule we use for our own reporting; and queries are assigned to one carrier or marketplace by name. An impression means a shopper searched the phrase and a pango.ai page was shown; it is a measure of demand for an explanation, not of parcel volume. Carriers we have fewer pages about are under-counted, which is why the index tracks change month over month rather than absolute size.
Where the anxiety is: carriers and marketplaces
| Carrier or marketplace | Searches reaching pango.ai, 28 days | Previous 28 days | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Poste Italiane (English-language tracking) | 106,113 | 38,053 | +179% |
| SHEIN | 32,239 | 12,729 | +153% |
| ASOS | 11,688 | new pages | |
| Cainiao | 9,057 | 4,215 | +115% |
| Depop | 8,761 | new pages | |
| FedEx | 8,643 | 4,679 | +85% |
| 4PX | 8,091 | 7,742 | +5% |
| Asendia | 6,356 | 3,222 | +97% |
| Temu | 6,022 | 1,501 | +301% |
| InPost | 5,580 | 1,392 | +301% |
| Vinted | 4,449 | 3,812 | +17% |
| AliExpress | 4,095 | 3,496 | +17% |
| Royal Mail | 3,619 | 2,223 | +63% |
| La Poste and Colissimo | 3,428 | 1,905 | +80% |
| USPS | 2,950 | 1,496 | +97% |
| Evri | 2,901 | 3,096 | -6% |
| Amazon Logistics | 2,809 | 1,823 | +54% |
| DHL | 2,096 | 1,399 | +50% |
Two things stand out. First, the marketplaces that ship from China (SHEIN, Temu, AliExpress through Cainiao and 4PX) together account for more status searches than every Western parcel carrier combined. The parcel is cheap, the journey is long and the tracking is written by three different companies, so the shopper searches. Second, the fastest-growing lines are Temu and InPost, both at four times last month's level; locker and marketplace deliveries are where the newest confusion is.
Poste Italiane sits at the top for a specific reason: Italians receiving international parcels see English statuses on an Italian carrier's page and search "poste italiane tracking in english" in very large numbers. It is the clearest case in the data of a carrier's own tracking page failing its customers in a way a translation would fix.
Which statuses people cannot decode
| Status family | Searches, 28 days | Previous 28 days |
|---|---|---|
| Out for delivery (will it come today, until what time) | 36,369 | 25,482 |
| Customs clearance (awaiting, completed, how long) | 17,407 | 3,470 |
| In transit (and why it is stuck) | 9,459 | 6,178 |
| Delivery attempted | 8,570 | 4,798 |
| Item bagged and bag received | 7,160 | 2,380 |
| Departed from facility | 5,195 | 3,167 |
| Arrived at sort facility | 4,811 | 4,017 |
| Returned to sender | 3,606 | 2,795 |
| Shipment information received / parcel data | 2,263 | 2,089 |
| Processed through facility | 2,192 | 950 |
| Label created | 1,977 | 794 |
| Delivered but not received | 1,686 | 841 |
| Awaiting collection | 1,191 | 499 |
| Held at customs | 1,070 | 379 |
| Handed over to the local carrier | 1,025 | 269 |
"Out for delivery" leads because it is the one status that creates a decision: do I stay in today? Customs clearance quintupled, which tracks the rise in cross-border marketplace orders and the duty changes of 2025. "Delivered but not received" doubled, and it is the status that turns into a support ticket every single time.
What people ask, in their own words
Across the 28 days, 80,191 impressions came from "what does X mean" questions and 20,134 from "how long" questions. Fewer than 400 came from "where is" or "why" questions. Shoppers are not asking where the parcel is; the tracking page already tells them that. They are asking what the words mean and how long the stage lasts. That is the gap every carrier tracking page leaves open, and it is the one a brand's own tracking page can close.
Where the searches come from
The United States produced 36% of all impressions, the United Kingdom 16%, India 6%, Canada 5%, Australia 4%, South Africa 4%, Brazil 3%, the Philippines 3%, Italy 3% and Germany 3%. The long tail is wide: the explainers in Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German and Indonesian each found an audience within days of publication, because the English status strings travel with the parcel into every market.
What a brand should do with this
The index is a map of the questions your customers will ask your support team, in the order they will ask them. Four conclusions:
- Translate the status, not just the page. The largest single source of searches is a carrier status in the wrong language. A tracking page that says "arrived at the sorting centre in your country" in the customer's language removes the search and the ticket.
- Answer "how long" before it is asked. A fifth of all questions are about duration. The tracking page and the dispatch message should carry the expected date for the stage the parcel is in, and update it when the stage slips.
- Treat customs as a stage with its own message. Customs searches quintupled. A customs hold with no explanation is the most expensive silence in the journey; the message should say whether a payment is expected and from whom.
- Watch "delivered but not received". It doubled, it is the status most likely to end in a refund, and it is the one where a proof-of-delivery photo and the drop location in the delivery message change the outcome.
Pango builds those four into the tracking page and the notifications from every connected carrier's events, in the customer's language. The data in this index is the reason the product works the way it does.
Next edition
The November edition will add week-by-week movement through the peak season, the share of searches that end on a carrier's own page against a brand's page, and the first full month of Temu and InPost data. If you want the dataset behind a specific carrier for your own planning, ask; the raw tables are ours and we share them with brands.
