How Sinful is climbing the Sexual Wellness SERPs by leaning into product intent.

Most sexual wellness SEO strategies start with the same assumption: build brand awareness, Google notices, rankings follow. The Salience Index data this year challenges that sequence at every step.

Ann Summers grew brand searches by 22.4%, 123,000 more people per month typing their name into Google, and lost 53,724 in organic visibility. Lovehoney’s brand searches stayed flat at 450,000 monthly and they lost 83,455.

Then there’s Sinful.

Sinful.co.uk went from 42,499 to 112,050 in organic visibility — a 163.7% increase in a market that declined 2.6%. Their brand searches grew from 3,600 to 5,400. That’s 50% growth. And it’s still less than 1% of Ann Summers’ brand demand.

They didn’t out-brand Ann Summers. They out-structured them.

What’s the story?

Start with the data from the 2026 Sexual Wellness Salience Index.

Sinful sits in the top 4 by organic visibility, with +163.7% YoY growth and +69,592 in absolute visibility — the single largest absolute gain in the market. The context:

• Lovehoney: -9.7% (-83,455 visibility). Second highest authority in the sector. Second most-searched brand.
• Ann Summers: -9.8% (-53,724 visibility). Highest brand search volume in the sector at 673,000 monthly.
• Bondara: -10.9% (-13,693 visibility). Third by authority.
• Sinful: +163.7% (+69,592 visibility). Brand searches at 5,400 monthly.

Sinful’s brand searches grew 50% — but they remain a fraction of the market leaders’ brand demand. What their growth demonstrates is that you can capture significant organic market share without proportional brand awareness. The two things moved differently for different reasons.

They also carry a Trustpilot rating of 4.5 out of 5.0 — prominently displayed in the site header alongside a customer care phone number and ‘Discreet delivery and packaging’ as a primary trust signal. Both are structural conversion features built into the browse experience, not marketing claims in an ad.

What are Sinful doing differently? 

Sinful made a specific architectural decision: to organise their site around how people search for products — not how retailers traditionally categorise them.

This sounds obvious. It isn’t.

Most sexual wellness retailers organise by product type at the top level — vibrators, dildos, lubricants — and leave buyers to navigate from there. What Sinful does differently is organise around intent at every level: from the top navigation down to the URL structure. The site is built for a buyer who arrives knowing roughly what they want and needs to be met exactly where they are.

The top navigation has five categories: Women, Men, Couples, BDSM, Sexy Lingerie. Those aren’t product types. They’re intent signals. The buyer self-selects their context first, then navigates to their product type.

That’s not a small design choice. It’s a structural decision about what kind of search engine experience you’re optimising for.

Go to Sinful’s Women section. Vibrators is a top-level category. Click through and the left-hand taxonomy opens up: twelve sub-categories.

Clitoral Vibrators, Clitoral Suction Vibrators, Dildo Vibrators, G-Spot Vibrators, App-Controlled Vibrators, Remote Controlled Vibrators, Magic Wands, Rabbit Vibrators, Finger Vibrators, Egg Vibrators, Panty Vibrators, Quiet Vibrators, Mini Vibrators.

Twelve. Under vibrators alone.

Then go one level deeper into Clitoral Vibrators. Six further sub-categories: Suction Vibrators, Tongue Vibrators, Bullet Vibrators, Mini Wands, Rose Vibrators, Lay-On Vibrators. The URL: /women/vibrators/clitoral-vibrators. Three levels of clean, crawlable hierarchy.

Each of those pages isn’t just a filtered product grid. The Clitoral Vibrators page opens with category-specific guidance: ‘Whether you prefer stylish design, simplicity or remarkably powerful vibrations, we definitely have a clit vibrator that is right for you. Choose a clitoral stimulator with a narrow tip for pinpointed stimulation or a wider surface for those all-encompassing vibrations that cover the vulva entirely.’

The Rabbit Vibrators page goes further. It addresses the actual decision a real buyer faces: size and length variation between models, whether to choose rotating beads, triple stimulation options for buyers open to anal play. It mentions specific brands — LELO, Tracy’s Dog, Amaysin — and it explicitly says ‘contact our customer service team, who are there to answer your questions.’ That’s not editorial content deployed for SEO. It’s decision support deployed at the exact moment of product intent.

Every category page also surfaces ‘Test Winners’ — products that have been externally tested and reviewed — as a curation layer within the Favourites navigation. You can browse by What’s New or by bestsellers, but you can also filter to the ones that passed an independent test. That’s a trust mechanism that functions inside the purchase decision, not alongside it.

And the search bar in the header promises ‘more than 7,000 products.’ That depth matters — not because bigger catalogues inherently rank better, but because specific searches need specific pages. 7,000 products means thousands of URL-level assets that can rank for thousands of product-specific queries. When someone searches ‘panty vibrator’ or ‘quiet vibrator’ or ‘app-controlled vibrator,’ Sinful has a dedicated page built around exactly that intent.

Contrast this with a generalist approach where ‘vibrators’ is a single category page showing hundreds of mixed products. The search engine can’t disambiguate intent. Neither can the shopper.

What are the implications of this? 

If Sinful’s 163.7% growth is primarily a site architecture story — and the data suggests it is — then the implication for brands watching their organic visibility decline is uncomfortable: more brand investment won’t fix it.

Ann Summers isn’t declining because people stopped knowing them. Brand searches grew by 123,000. The awareness is there. What isn’t there is the same granular product coverage for the queries that don’t include brand names. When someone searches ‘suction vibrator’ or ‘rose vibrator’ or ‘quiet vibrator,’ Sinful has a dedicated page for each. The category was built around that intent, not retrofitted to it.

The strategic question for market leaders isn’t ‘how do we build more brand awareness?’ They’re already winning that. The question is: ‘How do we rebuild our category pages around the specificity of how people actually search for products?’

That’s different work. It’s taxonomy work, not marketing work. And it’s slower to reverse than it sounds, because Sinful has already captured those rankings, and displacing them requires building pages that are more specific and more useful than what already ranks.

For mid-tier brands without entrenched positions: the window is open. Depth of taxonomy, combined with buying guidance content on each category page, is the playbook. The data shows it is working. The organic discovery layer in sexual wellness is genuinely up for grabs right now.