100+ Brands Featured
Market visibility
Brands grew
Moonpig traffic loss
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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 Greeting Cards Industry Report
Every year the Salience Index measures how easy it is to find the UK’s greeting-card brands in organic search. Each of the 199 retailers we track gets a single visibility score, built from where their category pages and product detail pages rank across the keywords shoppers use to buy cards, wrap, gifts and stationery. The July 2025 to July 2026 reading is the most one-sided we have recorded: the market declined 21.00% in twelve months, and the fall sits at the very top of the index rather than being spread evenly across smaller retailers.
Six platforms account for almost all of it. Moonpig lost 423,239 visibility points, notonthehighstreet.com lost 332,659, Photobox lost 139,282, Snapfish lost 85,940, Thortful lost 73,426 and Funky Pigeon lost 72,341 — a combined 1,126,887 points removed from the sector in a single year. Against that, the sixteen brands that grew added only around 144,109 points between them, roughly 13% of what the big platforms lost.
The organic discovery available to card shoppers is genuinely shrinking. The gains lower down the table are real, and several are impressive in percentage terms, but nowhere near large enough to refill the space the platforms have given up. For a category that has always relied on Google to introduce brands to buyers, that 21.00% decline is the figure every board in the sector should read first.
Card Factory is the clearest winner, and it is worth being precise about why. It posted the single largest absolute gain in the index, adding 21,397 points to reach 894,708 — yet in percentage terms that is only a 2.45% rise, so on a percentage leaderboard it barely registers. That percentage table is topped instead by low-base retailers whose growth looks dramatic because they started from almost nothing: bellybuttononline.com is up 393.92%, a move from 790 points to 3,902 and an absolute gain of just 3,112. The Art File’s +335.03% is more substantial, taking it from 5,450 to 23,709, a genuine 18,259-point gain.
The two leaderboards also disagree about the sector’s biggest loser. Moonpig fell 25.41%, which on a percentage view looks almost mid-table — milder, for instance, than temptationgifts.com at -64.26%. In absolute points, Moonpig’s loss of 423,239 is around nine times temptationgifts.com’s 46,183, and is comfortably the largest single loss in the whole index.
That produces a striking boardroom comparison. The two largest brands moved in opposite directions in the same market: Moonpig at -25.41%, which is 4.41 points worse than the market, and Card Factory at +2.45%, which is 23.45 points better — a year-on-year gap of 27.86 points between the number one and number two brands. Read the absolute and percentage leaderboards side by side and the same brands rank completely differently, which is why we publish both.
Consumer demand for greeting cards has held up; the strain is showing in the organic route brands use to capture it. The clearest way to see that is to compare each brand’s monthly branded search volume — how many people type its name into Google — against what happened to its organic visibility over the year.
At one end are the reputation-rich, discovery-poor brands. Moonpig has the highest branded demand in the entire index at 1,000,000 monthly brand searches, and its visibility still fell 25.41%. notonthehighstreet.com draws 301,000 monthly brand searches and dropped 39.70%; funkypigeon.com has 246,000 and fell 24.10%; snapfish.co.uk has 135,000 and fell 25.13%; thortful.com has 135,000 and fell 20.83%. Five brands with enormous name recognition all watched their non-branded organic discovery decline at once. People still search for these names directly, so the brands keep taking orders, but the shopper who starts with a generic query such as ‘personalised birthday card’ or ‘wedding anniversary card’ is finding them less often.
At the other end are the discovery-rich independents winning that generic search on product and design merit. The Art File attracts just 880 monthly brand searches and grew 335.03%; makingmeadows.co.uk has 110 and grew 186.58%; utilitygift.co.uk has 390 and grew 129.79%; rachelellen.co.uk has 1,000 and grew 98.90%. Almost nobody searches for these names, yet their category and product pages are ranking for the non-branded queries the big platforms are losing.
Three conclusions follow for anyone competing in this category. First, brand strength and organic visibility are pulling apart, and relying on the former to defend the latter is failing in real time. The five most-searched brands in the index are also among its sharpest decliners. If a shopper’s journey starts with a non-branded query and increasingly ends inside an AI Overview or a short list of organic results, the brands that only appear when their name is typed will keep losing the introduction. Competing for the generic query directly means deeper content on occasions, recipients and card types; category pages and product detail pages built to target those searches; clean product and breadcrumb schema markup so pages qualify for rich results and AI Overview citation; and internal linking that pushes authority from the homepage into the pages that actually rank.
Second, the space at the top is genuinely contestable now. Moonpig’s visibility lead over Card Factory has shrunk from 792,198 points to 347,562 in a year — the number one brand fell 25.41% while the number two grew 2.45% — so the index is de-concentrating.
Third, the two groups still gaining ground point to what works: value retail with real scale, like Card Factory, and design-led independents such as The Art File and Caroline Gardner that earn non-branded search on the strength of their ranges. The sixteen gainers recovered only 13% of what the top platforms lost, so most of the vacated visibility is still sitting there unclaimed.
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