100+ Brands Featured
UK Pet Supplies Market Growth
Pets at Home Monthly Brand Searches
PetDrugsOnline's YoY Visit Gain
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The UK's No.1 Pet Supplies Industry Report
Between March 2025 and March 2026, the UK pet supplies market grew +14.00% in aggregate organic search traffic across 321 tracked brands. That’s the headline. It’s also the easiest number to misread, because almost all the upside is being captured by a specific kind of brand. And it isn’t the one you’d expect.
The category specialists, the pharmacy-only outfits, the aquatics-only operators, the condition-specific supplement brands, they are eating the market. The generalist “one-stop pet shop” is losing relative share even when its absolute traffic rises. Pets at Home grew 8.83% in a 14% market. That’s not growth. That’s relative decline dressed up as good news.
PetDrugsOnline added 194,616 monthly visits in one year. Pets at Home, with five times the base, added 116,240. That is the whole story in two numbers.
There’s a reason for that. And it isn’t about budget, brand, or backlinks. It’s about how pet owners now search. People don’t open Google and type “pet shop near me” the way they used to. They type “best joint supplement for senior labradors.” Or “ich treatment freshwater aquarium.” Or “flea treatment for cats with kidney issues.” The query has fragmented along condition, species, and product type. The retailer name no longer enters the keyboard.
| Brand | YoY Growth | Vs +14% Market |
|---|---|---|
| Yumove | +75.27% | +61.27% |
| PetDrugsOnline | +67.50% | +53.50% |
| Swell UK | +62.44% | +48.44% |
| Pooch & Mutt | +33.60% | +19.60% |
| Royal Canin | +22.07% | +8.07% |
| Jollyes | +14.90% | +0.90% |
| Market benchmark | +14.00% | – |
| Pets at Home | +8.83% | -5.17% |
| Zooplus | +1.60% | -12.40% |
| Purina | -4.89% | -18.89% |
| VetUK | -10.13% | -24.13% |
Pet pharmacy is where the specialist thesis becomes impossible to argue with. PetDrugsOnline added +194,616 monthly visits year on year, the largest absolute traffic gain in the entire sector. Hyperdrug added +23,987. That’s the upside.
Now look at the bleed. VetUK lost -16,382 visits. Vetpharmacy lost -6,362. Wellbeloved lost -41,563. Animed lost -54,486 visits, a -35.54% drop. Here is the part that should bother a CMO sitting in the bleeding half. Animed has 355,860 customer reviews, the largest review base in the entire dataset. VetUK has 25,940 reviews at 4.7 stars. Neither metric is insulating either brand from share loss.
There’s a reason for that. Reviews are a trust signal once the buyer has found you. They don’t help you get found in the first place. If your pages aren’t matching the specific medical query the owner types, the review count is decoration.
| Pharmacy brand | YoY change in visits | % change |
|---|---|---|
| PetDrugsOnline | +194,616 | +67.50% |
| Hyperdrug | +23,987 | +25.30% |
| VetUK | -16,382 | -10.13% |
| Vetpharmacy | -6,362 | -32.71% |
| Wellbeloved | -41,563 | -46.33% |
| Animed | -54,486 | -35.54% |
Pets at Home is brand-reach rank 1. 1.5 million monthly searches for the brand name. By every awareness metric, the category leader. Grew 8.83%. Market grew 14%. So the category leader, by awareness, underperformed the market by 5.17 percentage points.
Royal Canin: brand-reach rank 2. Visibility rank 10. The classic Sleeping Giant pattern in the data. Authority and recall that no longer cash in as clicks. Zooplus: brand-reach rank 3. Grew 1.60%. Effectively flat in a 14% market.
Now flip that on its head. Swell UK is brand-reach rank 31 with 6,600 monthly brand searches. Grew 62.44%. Aquatics to Your Door is rank 35. Grew 110.24%. These brands have a fraction of the awareness. They have most of the growth.
This is the inversion. Brand reach was a leading indicator. Now it is a lagging vanity number. The brands ranked highly on it were the brands whose model worked five years ago.
Brand-reach measurement was designed for a catalogue era. The assumption was simple. Customer wants pet thing, customer remembers retailer name, customer types retailer name into Google, customer arrives, customer buys. That model required the retailer name to be the entry point. The entry point is no longer the retailer name. It’s the symptom, the species, the SKU. So brand recall hasn’t lost value. It’s lost its place in the funnel. It now sits much closer to the checkout than to the front door.
| Brand | Brand Reach Rank | Brand Searches/mo | YoY Organic Growth | Vs +14% Market |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pets at Home | #1 | 1,500,000 | +8.83% | -5.17% |
| Royal Canin | #2 | 22,200 | +22.07% | +8.07% |
| Zooplus | #3 | 90,500 | +1.60% | -12.40% |
| Swell UK | #31 | 6,600 | +62.44% | +48.44% |
| Aquatics to Your Door | #35 | – | +110.24% | +96.24% |
Aquatics is the second clean story. Swell UK +62.44%. Aquatics to Your Door +110.24%. Reptiles.swelluk.com +32.39%. Reptile Centre +21.72%.
Not every aquatics brand is winning. Fishkeeper lost 8.87%. Exotic Pets dropped roughly 21 percentage points behind market. So the niche itself isn’t the moat. The moat is being an online-first specialist within the niche. Legacy aquatic shops are still losing, even as the niche grows around them.
The same fork exists in the supplement category. Yumove +75.27%, Pooch and Mutt +33.60%, both online-native, both condition-led.
Spiky winners with smaller bases tell the same story. Hepper went from 1,915 to 7,819 visits (+308%). Poppy’s Picnic went from 2,374 to 6,989 (+194%). Zoetis from 1,887 to 5,878 (+211%). Tiny brands. Massive percentage gains. Same mechanism.
This pattern repeats across consumer sectors. In toys, The Entertainer captured over 100,000 incremental clicks by reorganising its SEO around age-led intent rather than category. In fitness equipment, Gravity Fitness grew organic traffic 191% by going deep on callisthenics, a niche the generalists left alone. The keyword universe is fragmenting in every consumer vertical. Pet supplies is just the latest one to show the math in public.
If you run a generalist, you have two jobs. One: identify every condition, species, and product-type query where a specialist is outranking you and own those pages properly. Not as category landing pages. As intent-matched articles, comparison pages, symptom-led guides. Two: stop measuring brand reach as a leading indicator. It isn’t one. It’s a memory of how the market used to work. If you run a specialist, the data says you have less than two years to fortify. Generalists with capital will work this out. The window where authority and recall don’t convert is the window where you build defensible content depth.
| Brand | Mar 2025 Visits | Mar 2026 Visits | YoY Growth |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hepper | 1,915 | 7,819 | +308% |
| Zoetis | 1,887 | 5,878 | +211% |
| Poppy’s Picnic | 2,374 | 6,989 | +194% |
| Aquatics to Your Door | 29,560 | 62,147 | +110% |
| Omlet | 35,486 | 67,349 | +90% |
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