Abstract: It was recently shown that standard sub-GeV dark matter (DM) candidates can be effectively probed by large neutrino observatories via annual modulation of the total photomultiplier hit rate. That work focused on the production of light by the excitation of scintillator molecules and considered the JUNO detector, surpassing limits from dedicated dark-matter detectors and reaching theoretical targets. Here, we significantly generalize that work, now also taking into account ionization channels and extending the analysis to other liquid-scintillator detectors, including SNO+, Daya Bay, Borexino, and KamLAND. We also extend this idea to dual-phase xenon experiments, using an analogous “dark-electron rate”, a term we use to refer to the total rate of raw electron hits. While single-electron searches at low DM masses in XENON1T and XENONnT have strong cuts that keep only 0.01% of the exposure, we advocate for an approach where instead xenon detectors should use the bulk of the dark-electron rate and perform an annual-modulation search. This technique can also be used to probe DM-nucleon interactions via the Migdal effect.