100+ Brands Featured
Market visibility
Top visibility score
Biggest grower
Our reports have been the UK’s No.1 search marketing benchmark for the last 10 years! Marketing decision makers spanning 60 sectors have downloaded our reports to save over 72 hours of research and discover exactly how their brand ranks against the competition in search, visibility, and growth potential.
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 Booksellers Industry Report
Across 275 UK bookseller brands, search visibility fell 5.00% year-on-year between May 2025 and May 2026. The top-line figure reads like a quiet year, the kind you could file under normal seasonal variation. Underneath the average, two groups of booksellers moved in opposite directions over the twelve months. The line dividing them follows the business model each one runs, and company size did not predict which side a brand landed on.
Second-hand, discount and aggregator sellers declined together. World of Books lost 36.45% of its visibility, falling from 138,653 to 88,110 monthly visits — a drop of 50,543, the largest single decline in the dataset. AbeBooks fell 25.77%, Books2Door 26.54%, the Oxfam online shop 23.26%, ThriftBooks 68.50% and Wordery 64.64%. Removing World of Books, the largest faller, still leaves five brands sharing one business model each down between 23% and 69% on their own numbers, so the decline belongs to the whole second-hand and aggregator segment.
Branded full-price destinations and publishers moved the other way against that same negative market. Waterstones held at -3.58%, still rank 1 and 1.42 points ahead of the market. The Works grew 3.84% to 359,397 visits. Forbidden Planet added 11.20%, HarperCollins 22.65% and Usborne 37.78%. The brands that grew through the downturn share one trait: readers search for them by name, so a cheaper rival result has nothing to substitute.
The two branded leaders are pulling further ahead of the field. Waterstones holds 536,242 in the index and The Works 359,397, a combined 895,639 visits between the two of them. Both beat the -5.00% market change over the year: Waterstones at -3.58%, 1.42 points ahead, and The Works at +3.84%, a clear 8.84 points ahead.
The brands sitting at ranks three through seven are all used or aggregator models, and every one of them lost ground over the same period. The visibility they shed is moving up the table toward the two destinations customers already know by name, and over the year the gap between the two leaders and the price-led sites beneath them widened.
The Works and Waterstones do slightly different jobs, which matters for anyone benchmarking against them. The Works is a value retailer selling books alongside stationery, toys and craft, and it carries 673,000 monthly brand searches, the largest brand-search figure in the index and roughly eight times World of Books’ branded demand. Forbidden Planet’s 11.20% rise sits on the continued strength of manga, graphic novels and fandom editions, where the buyer wants a specific shop and shops less on price. That named demand is the asset carrying the chains through a negative market.
| Brand | Visibility | YoY Change | Vs -5% Market |
|---|---|---|---|
| Waterstones | 536,242 | -3.58% | +1.42 |
| The Works | 359,397 | +3.84% | +8.84 |
| Forbidden Planet | 48,031 | +11.20% | +16.20 |
The clearest illustration of what changed over the year sits in the gap between review counts and search rankings. ThriftBooks carries 2,804,927 customer reviews at an average of 4.7 stars, one of the strongest review profiles of any bookseller in the dataset. Over the twelve months it lost 68.50% of its search visibility, falling from 13,604 to 4,285 monthly visits. The Works, recorded at 1,381 reviews and 1.9 stars, grew 3.84% over the same period. Review volume and star ratings, which used to track loosely with search performance, no longer earn ranking positions on their own in this category.
Two duller explanations sit underneath the headline before anyone reaches for review counts. ThriftBooks and AbeBooks’ .com domain are both US-based and both fell by roughly two-thirds, which is consistent with Google preferring UK retailers for UK searchers. And much of the second-hand cohort’s traffic came from generic title queries — a specific title plus “used”, “cheap” or “second-hand” — that marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay and Vinted now answer inside apps the reader already has open.
The practical reading for a discount or second-hand seller is that piling up reviews will not defend a ranking position here. World of Books still draws 246,000 monthly brand searches and carries 519,774 reviews at 4.6 stars, so shoppers plainly know and trust it, and its visibility still fell 36.45%.
| Brand | Reviews | Avg Stars | Visibility YoY |
|---|---|---|---|
| ThriftBooks | 2,804,927 | 4.7 | -68.50% |
| World of Books | 519,774 | 4.6 | -36.45% |
| The Works | 1,381 | 1.9 | +3.84% |
| Usborne | — | — | +37.78% |
The decline in the aggregator cohort lines up with how title-level book queries now behave in the results page. A search for a specific book title is among the most substitutable queries in retail: the reader wants a known item and a dozen sellers can satisfy it, so the cheapest listing usually won the visit. Those queries were the foundation the aggregator visibility model was built on. More of them now resolve inside the results page itself, through AI Overviews that summarise availability and price and through Google’s shopping and merchant surfaces, so the organic visit that used to land on an aggregator’s product detail page increasingly does not happen.
Branded search behaves differently. A reader typing “Waterstones” or “Forbidden Planet” has already chosen where to buy, an AI Overview has nothing to substitute, and that demand held up across the year.
For a discount or second-hand seller, competing harder on the same substitutable title queries is unlikely to bring the traffic back. The brands that grew built enough recognition that readers search for them by name, and they invested in category pages and content covering authors, genres and recommendations rather than thin product detail pages. The publishers that grew, HarperCollins and Usborne among them, sell direct and own the canonical page for their own titles, which is the page an AI Overview tends to cite. For a retailer competing against those publishers, the question worth answering is what its page offers on an author or title search that the publisher’s own page does not: range, availability, curation, editions.
Still scrolling? Here's the full 69-page report.
Download the free reportDigital performance reports covering 60+ industries within retail, finance and B2B.
