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Market traffic fall
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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 Trade Plumbing Industry Report
The Salience Index ranks more than 100 UK plumbing merchants, radiator specialists, bathroom retailers and trade counters on search, brand and social. This edition compares August 2026 with August 2025, and across the Index as a whole, estimated organic search traffic fell 17% year on year.
That 17% is an Index-wide average, and almost all of it comes from a small number of very large general retailers that sell plumbing alongside timber, tools, kitchens and garden ranges. Wickes fell 34% across the year, and a brand of that size moving that far pulls the Index average down on its own.
Among the brands whose range is mainly plumbing, heating and bathrooms, estimated traffic fell 4% between them, and a good number of those brands grew. Stelrad, Wholesale Domestic, Heat and Plumb, Bathroom Mountain and The Radiator Warehouse each added more than a third to their estimated monthly search traffic. Toolstation finished the year within 1% of where it started, which moved it up to second place in the Index.
Benchmark your own year against the 4% the plumbing and heating specialists managed between them, because most of the Index-wide 17% sits with general retailers where plumbing is one department out of twelve. A specialist down 8% year on year is four points behind its direct competitors, even though the same number looks nine points ahead of the Index.
| Brand or group | 12-month traffic change | Movement |
|---|---|---|
| Index (100+ brands) | -17% | – |
| Plumbing and heating specialists | -4% | – |
| Stelrad | +47% | Largest gain in the Index |
| Toolstation | Within 1% | Up to 2nd |
| Wickes | -34% | Lost 2nd place |
Stelrad grew its estimated monthly search traffic 47% over the 12 months, the largest gain of any brand in the Index, and its own site now draws more estimated search traffic than most of the merchants that stock its radiators.
For anyone selling a manufacturer’s catalogue, that is worth sitting with. Someone searching “type 22 radiator 1200 x 600” or “Stelrad Compact K2” is carrying out a specification search, and a manufacturer site answers it with heat output tables, dimension charts and fitting guidance on one deep page. Merchant product detail pages for the same radiator usually run the manufacturer’s own feed copy, repeated word for word across every stockist listing the same SKU, so the merchant pages compete with each other on price and delivery while the manufacturer page answers the question that was typed.
The rest of the growth in this edition sits with the specialists. Wholesale Domestic, Heat and Plumb, Bathroom Mountain and The Radiator Warehouse each added more than a third to their estimated traffic in a year when the Index fell 17%. Toolstation held within 1% of last year, which was enough to take second place from Wickes.
If you stock other people’s products, the number to pull before your next planning session is how much of your category and product search traffic now goes to the manufacturers whose ranges you list.
| Brand | Mainly sells | 12-month traffic change |
|---|---|---|
| Stelrad | Radiators (manufacturer) | +47% |
| Wholesale Domestic | Bathrooms and heating | More than +33% |
| Heat and Plumb | Bathrooms and heating | More than +33% |
| Bathroom Mountain | Bathrooms | More than +33% |
| The Radiator Warehouse | Radiators | More than +33% |
| Toolstation | Trade counter | Within 1% |
| Wickes | General retail | -34% |
Searches that carry an exact size held flat across the 12 months to July 2026, while every other plumbing search fell 7%. “15mm compression nut”, “40mm waste fittings”, “type 22 radiator 1200 x 600”: searches written like this now account for one in seven plumbing searches, and the volume behind them has held while the rest of the sector’s search demand has fallen away.
These are the clearest buying signals in the sector’s keyword data. Someone typing a size has the old part in their hand or the measurement written on a job sheet, and they click the result that shows that exact size in stock today.
The merchants winning those searches give each size its own indexable URL, with the size in the H1, the title tag and the breadcrumb, and they link to it from the parent category page. On a lot of plumbing sites the size exists only as a query parameter that an on-page filter appends, which is then blocked in robots.txt or canonicalised back to the parent category page, so the only page left that can rank for “15mm compression nut” is a product detail page for a single SKU.
The work is unglamorous: a static size-level category page for each high-volume size, product schema carrying the dimension attribute, and internal links from the parent category page and from adjacent sizes. The report lists the sized searches with the most volume in the sector, so you can decide which sizes earn a page of their own.
| Search group | 12-month change | Share of plumbing searches |
|---|---|---|
| Searches containing an exact size | Flat | 1 in 7 |
| All other plumbing searches | -7% | 6 in 7 |
Two long-running moves in the keyword data should change what a radiator or heating category page leads with this winter.
Electric heating and energy-saving searches have fallen for a fourth year. December searches for “heater oil filled radiator” went from 246,000 in December 2022 to 41,000 in December 2025, a fall of 84%. The 2022 figure was driven by that autumn’s energy price rises, and the volume has not come back since. Seasonal content, paid budget and category merchandising still built around the running-cost question is aimed at a quarter of the audience it reached three winters ago.
Finish preferences moved in the opposite direction. Searches for brass, bronze and gold radiators rose 32% year on year, while black, anthracite and grey fell. Anthracite has been the lead product image and the first colour facet on most radiator category pages for years. If brass sits three clicks into your filters with no indexable URL, no photography and no copy, you are hard to find for the searches that are growing.
The report sets authority, referring domains and page speed against estimated traffic for every brand we track, so you can see which sites perform beyond their link profile, and it ranks brand awareness using online reviews, owned social score and branded search volume together.
| Search group | Direction over the year |
|---|---|
| Brass, bronze and gold radiators | +32% |
| Black, anthracite and grey radiators | Fell |
| Electric heating and energy saving | Fell for a fourth year |
| “heater oil filled radiator” (December) | 246K in 2022 to 41K in 2025, -84% |
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