On Running is not Nike. They don’t have 1.5 million brand searches per month or 383,000 social followers.
They added 121,898 organic visits this year. While Nike lost 342,696.
Here’s what’s going on
The Salience Index 2026 tracked organic visibility across 50+ UK sportswear brands from January 2025 to January 2026. The numbers are not close:
- On Running (on.com): 357,310 → 479,208 organic visits. +34.1%.
- Nike (nike.com): 4,649,377 → 4,306,681. -7.4%. Lost 342,696 visits.
- Adidas (adidas.co.uk): 3,970,811 → 3,370,741. -15.1%. Lost 600,070 visits.
On Running also has a page speed score of 69 on desktop / 56 on mobile, placing it in the top five across the entire sector. Their monthly brand searches of 110,000 are growing year-on-year.
On Running’s organic growth isn’t accidental. Their site architecture makes a specific decision: optimise for the search behaviour of the committed runner, not the casual sportswear browser.
The committed runner searches differently. They search for running surfaces (‘trail running shoes’), specific technologies (‘Cloudtec running shoes’), distance-specific products (‘marathon racing shoes’), and their own brand terms as they build loyalty. These are the queries On Running is building content authority around. Nike and Adidas are still fighting for ‘mens trainers’ — a term that is down 22% year-on-year according to the Salience Index 2026 data.
The contrast at a structural level is stark. Broad category terms dominate heritage brand organic presence. ‘Mens trainers’ — 201,000 monthly searches, down 22% year-on-year. ‘Running shoes’ — 74,000 monthly searches, down 23% year-on-year. ‘Football boots’ — 86,000 monthly searches, down 41% year-on-year. These are the traffic pillars that Nike and Adidas built their organic presence on. Every one of them is in freefall.
On Running is not in that fight. Their content infrastructure is built around a different and growing set of intent signals. When the category behemoths contract, On Running doesn’t feel the impact the same way. They’re not in the same intent arena.
What does this mean?
The lesson from On Running’s data is not ‘be a performance running brand.’ It’s ‘understand who your specific customer is, understand what they actually search for, and build your content architecture around that — not around what the industry calls the category’s big terms.’
Adanola demonstrates the same principle in a different space. Up 8.9% in organic visibility (464,531 → 505,746) — a brand serving women’s fitness and lifestyle, building content around the specific intent clusters that audience uses. Not ‘womens trainers’ (down 22%). Something more specific, more targeted, more matched to the intent of an audience that has already decided what kind of brand they want.
This approach doesn’t work if you try to replicate it wholesale onto a broad-range retailer. Sports Direct gets 5.3 million organic visits per month and 4.09 million brand searches. Their strategy is to be everywhere. The On Running model is to be very specifically somewhere.
The question is whether your brand has a defined audience with specific search behaviour you can build authority around. If the answer is yes, the On Running data suggests what the payoff looks like: double-digit visibility growth in a market where the giants are losing ground. If the answer is no — if you’re genuinely trying to serve everyone — then the work is finding the segments within your range where you can apply this specificity and build it sector by sector.
The full brand-by-brand breakdown is in the Salience Sportswear Index 2026. Download it here.