But what makes MLMs so controversial is that distributors are also encouraged to recruit other distributors to work under them, often netting a portion of those new distributors’ sales in addition to their own commissions.

There’s a lot of debate over whether multi-level marketing companies provide people with a legitimate way to make an income, or if they’re something more sinister. A look at any direct sales company’s income disclosure report will reveal that a very small percentage of company representatives make enough money to support themselves, and an AARP survey last year found that 73 percent of MLM distributors don’t even make enough to break even.

While these companies pitch a lifestyle of earning good money while you stay home with your kids or working from your phone while you travel the world, the reality is that most direct sales companies, because of their recruitment-based structure, only offer a very limited number of opportunities for people to earn big money. For most MLM companies, those opportunities go to the first handful of people to join, so they’re long gone by the time you hear about the company.

Still, the MLM industry is booming, with 6.2 million people selling products and recruiting new distributors in 2018. Those sales people sold products to 36.6 million customers that year. Overall, the industry generates $34.9 billion in revenue each year in the U.S.

The industry is growing, despite all its controversy, and the biggest MLMs in the U.S. are always open to recruiting new sellers in new places. That’s why we wanted to see how some of the most popular MLMs have spread across the U.S. as they’ve grown.

Using Google Trends data, we analyzed web searches for 13 of the top new MLMs in the U.S. All of these companies were founded after 2006, so web searches paint a decent picture of how they’ve grown and spread to new parts of the country. Here’s what we learned.