They don't even count searches (i.e. traffic), they count hits from searches in a number of popular engines - https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-lang

They don't even count searches (i.e. traffic), they count hits from searches in a number of popular engines - https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-definition/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-defi... > The ratings are calculated by counting hits of the most popular search engines. The search query that is used is +"<language> programming". The number of hits determines the ratings of a language.