100+ Brands Featured
Brands Tracked
Market Decline YoY
Biggest % Grower
I was extremely impressed with the insight and depth of analysis in the Salience Report... The data-driven analysis tracking visibility, authority, links, page speed, search volume, keywords, and more paints a detailed picture of brand performance and emerging trends. The team was delighted to be featured.
The UK's No.1 Confectionery report
The 36% decline isn’t evenly distributed. Fortnum & Mason alone lost 1.79 million monthly organic visits, a −90% YoY collapse that accounts for a disproportionate slice of the entire market shrinkage. Strip that one outlier out and the picture changes. Lindt grew traffic by 38% to 330,466 monthly visits, beating market average by 74 points. Hotel Chocolat held #1 with +6% (and +42% vs market).Â
Below the top five, Monmore Confectionery climbed from #39 to #11 on a +335% YoY surge. Candy Crave posted +956% YoY, the biggest absolute % growth in the top 100. The challenger brands that built proper search foundations over the last 24 months aren’t being lifted by a rising tide. They’re picking up the traffic the leaders are leaving on the table.
| Brand | Rank | Traffic | YoY change | vs. market |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hotel Chocolat | #1 | 429,811 | +6% | +42% |
| Lindt | #2 | 330,466 | +38% | +74% |
| Cadbury Gifts Direct | #3 | 268,745 | +6% | +42% |
| Fortnum & Mason | #4 | 208,046 | −90% | −54% |
| Cadbury | #5 | 195,492 | −20% | +16% |
| Monmore Confectionery | #11 | 58,970 | +335% | +371% |
Ferrero Rocher is the most recognised confectionery brand in the UK. With 90,500 brand searches per month and an owned-social score of 38,047, it ranks #1 on Salience’s combined Brand Awareness measure. In organic search, it ranks #42. That’s a 41-rank gap between recognition and visibility, the single most expensive blind spot we see in confectionery marketing.
Recognition is built over decades; organic rank is built over months of disciplined keyword work. They compound differently. Hotel Chocolat (#3 on awareness, #1 on organic) is doing the work, its 450,000 monthly brand searches translate to 429,811 monthly organic visits because it ranks for the keywords its category-curious shoppers actually use. Lindt is the same balanced pattern (#2 awareness, #2 organic). Ferrero isn’t.
The opposite pattern matters too. Monmore Confectionery ranks #22 on awareness but #11 on organic, proof that organic visibility belongs to whoever does the unglamorous keyword work, regardless of brand-search volume. The full Brand Awareness leaderboard, all brands, ranked side-by-side against organic, is in the report.
| Brand | Awareness rank | Organic rank |
|---|---|---|
| Ferrero Rocher | #1 | #42 |
| Lindt | #2 | #2 |
| Hotel Chocolat | #3 | #1 |
| Fortnum & Mason | #4 | #4 |
| Cadbury | #5 | #5 |
| Monmore Confectionery | #22 | #11 |
Domain authority is the slowest-building, hardest-to-fake signal in search. It’s also the one that explains most of why the leaderboard looks the way it does in 2026.
The top of the authority table reads almost identically to the top of the traffic table: Hotel Chocolat (#1), Lindt (#2), Fortnum & Mason (#3), Cadbury (#4), Cadbury Gifts Direct (#5). That overlap isn’t a coincidence. The brands at the top earned their links over years through PR, content, and category coverage.Â
But authority alone doesn’t immunise you. Fortnum & Mason ranks #1 on referring domains across the entire category, and still posted a −90% YoY collapse on organic traffic. The link profile is necessary, not sufficient. Without compounding content and keyword work, even a category-leading authority position can leak traffic at scale. I see this as the difference between domain authority and topical authority. Topical authority is not something you earn, but rather it’s something you are. It’s about constantly being the best answer to every question about that topic. You are topically authoritative if you are top of mind, not purely due to size or familiarity, but due to relevance and understanding of intents and pain points. If I want to gift chocolate at Christmas or for an anniversary, I go to Lindt. Because they are, and always have been, the answer to my questions about the size of the box and the presentation, etc. Hotel Chocolat are much the same. You will tend to see a very strong correlation between the brands at the top of this table (i.e., those with both strong authority and strong traffic) and those with fantastic topical authority. I think topical authority is more the reason for their high traffic volume than the domain authority itself. I’ve written more on why topical authority should sit at the core of any modern content strategy, and if you want more of my running take on where search is heading you can follow me on LinkedIn.Â
| Brand | Authority rank | Referring Domain rank | Organic rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hotel Chocolat | #1 | #2 | #1 |
| Lindt | #2 | #6 | #2 |
| Fortnum & Mason | #3 | #1 | #4 |
| Cadbury | #4 | #3 | #5 |
| Cadbury Gifts Direct | #5 | #5 | #3 |
Most of confectionery’s evergreen vocabulary is shrinking. Search volume for “chocolate” dropped −6% YoY. “Luxury chocolate” fell −40%. “Marshmallow” −13%. “Wholesale sweets” −28%. “Chocolate hamper” −18%. The SEO playbook your team built five years ago is increasingly aimed at terms that fewer people are searching for.
The growth is hiding in tighter, sharper niches. “Halal marshmallows” +23%. “Matcha chocolate” +59%. “Milk bottle sweets” +32%. “70 dark chocolate” +64%. None of these are mainstream category terms. Granted, none of them are hugely long-tail, ultra-specific, but they are definitely a category deeper than the terms you used to optimise for. The results for these terms are often PDPs rather than PLPs. There is natively higher purchase intent in a category like this. And all of them have low competition and rising volume, which is the textbook definition of opportunity. The same pattern shows up in other retail categories, and we covered an almost identical dynamic in the keyword niches smaller toy brands are quietly profiting from.
The opportunity-keyword leaderboard in this year’s index ranks terms with high volume and low competition scores. “Vegan chocolate” has 10,000 monthly searches at competition score 5. “Popping candy” is 7,300 / 3. “Chocolate box” is 7,000 / 4.
If you can’t name which keyword clusters are growing, and which competitors are quietly building positions in them, you’re not competing on the same field as the leaders. This is exactly the kind of work we do for ecommerce brands looking to compound their organic position year on year.
| Cluster | Monthly searches | Competition score |
|---|---|---|
| Vegan chocolate | 10,000 | 5 |
| Popping candy | 7,300 | 3 |
| Chocolate box | 7,000 | 4 |
| Bonbons | 12,100 | — |
| Matcha chocolate | 880 | — |
| Halal marshmallows | 1,900 | — |
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