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2026 Sportswear Industry Analysis: why On Running is gaining while legacy leaders wobble

The 2026 Sportswear Industry Analysis tells a clear story. Search demand is still there. The market even edged up by 2% overall. But the gains are not being shared evenly. While Nike and Adidas lost ground, On Running grew organic visibility by 34%, rising to rank 17 with a traffic score of 479,208, up from 357,310 a year earlier. That sits in sharp contrast to Nike at -7% and Adidas at -15%. If you want the wider picture, get the free 69-page report for the full sportswear breakdown.

That matters because sportswear search is no longer a simple scale game. Brand size still helps, but it is not enough on its own. The brands moving now are the ones matching product demand, intent, site experience and authority more tightly than the old giants.

Which sportswear brands lead the market, and who is moving fastest?

Organic visibility snapshot, Jan 2026 vs Jan 2025

Industry variance: +2%

What the table shows: Search demand is still there, but gains are being distributed unevenly. On Running added 122,000 visibility points in a market that only grew 2%, which means it did not just move with the tide. It took share. That stands in sharp contrast to Nike and Adidas, both of which lost visibility despite their scale.

Why it matters: Sportswear search is no longer a simple scale game. The brands moving now are the ones matching product demand, intent, site experience and authority more tightly than the old giants.

Search discovery in sportswear is fragmenting into narrower journeys. Shoppers are no longer moving in a straight line from a broad category query to checkout. They are hopping between brand, use case, silhouette, colour and cultural cue. That tends to favour brands with a tighter product story and cleaner intent matching.

The biggest winners and losses in sportswear visibility

Where visibility swung hardest year on year

What the table shows: The extremes are eye-catching, but they need careful reading. Huge jumps such as Vans, The North Face and Timberland often point to low starting bases, structural changes or fresh indexation rather than straightforward momentum. Even so, they show how quickly visibility can swing when search engines reassess a site’s relevance.

Key insight: The bigger warning sign is on the downside. Losses of this size often suggest missed intent, weak category maintenance, technical drag or stale content architecture.

In sportswear, search behaviour is moving quickly around running, women’s styling, seasonal sportswear and trend-led product language. If a brand’s taxonomy still reflects old merchandising logic, it gets left behind.

Why is On Running growing while Nike and Adidas are declining?

The short answer is not brand awareness. Nike still dominates owned social score at 383,500 and carries 1.5 million monthly brand searches. Adidas still logs 823,000 brand searches and a social score of 121,550. On Running sits much lower on raw awareness, with 110,000 brand searches and an owned social score of 5,247. Yet it still grew faster in organic visibility.

That points to a sharper search model. On Running sits in the high-visibility, low-authority overachiever group. It also appears in the traffic-versus-referring-domains view among brands outperforming the size of their link profile. That usually means the site is doing more with what it has: better content alignment, cleaner category structure, stronger intent coverage and better commercial page relevance.

Why it matters: Search engines are getting better at spotting whether a page actually serves the task behind the query. In sportswear, the winning pages are less generic and more exact about sport, fit, gender, weather, style and purpose.

Challenger growth often comes from being more precise, not louder. For brands trying to follow that path, content marketing and category design need to work together rather than sit in separate lanes.

Which sportswear brands punch above their weight on authority and links?

What the table shows: The overachiever list highlights brands getting more out of their footprint. Lululemon, Adanola and Pro:Direct Sport are not simply riding brand fame. They are turning their sites into better answers for commercial searches. On Running is not in the top five callout box, but it still sits in the same broader pattern.

The sleeping giants tell the opposite story. These brands have enough authority to do more, but something on-site is holding them back. In sportswear, that often comes down to category sprawl, duplication, weak internal linking or pages trying to rank for everything at once.

Action point: Authority opens the door, but relevance gets you through it. If your site has the link equity but not the traffic, the fix is usually structural before it is promotional.

Which sportswear sites are technically quickest, and does that still matter?

The fastest page speed performers in the report include Sports Direct, Vivobarefoot, On Running, Brooks Running, JD Sports, New Balance, Kickers, Tommy, Runners Need and Start Fitness. At the slower end of the visible leaderboard sit brands such as Adanola, Quiksilver, Lacoste, Vans, Puma, Adidas and Gymshark.

That lines up with a core truth of sportswear search. Page speed is not just a technical metric. It is a retail behaviour metric. Sportswear traffic is often mobile, impatient and price-aware. A one-second delay in page load time can mean a 7% loss in conversions, and in a category full of comparison behaviour, that delay can also push shoppers back into search.

Why it matters: On Running stands out because it combines fast pages with strong performance against its authority and link profile. That mix helps preserve rankings, keep commercial traffic on-site and support conversion during peak demand.

Fast, stable templates matter most around launch-led spikes, training cycles and seasonal gear changes. If technical performance slips in those moments, visibility and conversion both get hit.

What are shoppers searching for in sportswear in 2026?

Emerging and receding product demand

What the table shows: Search demand is shifting away from broad, old-school head terms and towards more specific, style-led and use-case-led phrases. Queries like “brown trainers womens” and “leopard print trainers womens” show that sportswear is no longer being discovered as pure performance kit. It is part fashion search, part identity search and part function search.

Key insight: Younger shoppers are not neatly separating gymwear, casualwear and streetwear in the way many site structures still do. Brands that keep their content and navigation too rigid will miss those hybrid journeys.

Which sportswear brands are rising in search demand?

Emerging and receding brand searches

What the table shows: Big legacy brands still dominate absolute demand, but several are receding. Meanwhile, smaller or more focused brands are building momentum. That usually points to a market where interest is splintering into subcultures and specialist niches rather than consolidating around one or two universal winners.

That is good news for challenger brands, but only if they can hold their nerve. As the market fragments, the route to growth is less about shouting “we do sportswear” and more about owning a tighter corner of the conversation, whether that is running, outdoor crossover, women’s training, teamwear or fashion-led athleisure.

Which keywords still matter most, and where are the softer openings?

Volume, difficulty and where opportunity still exists

What the table shows: The most interesting thing here is not just search volume, but the balance between volume and openness. “Football boots” and “running shoes” still matter, but they are crowded and expensive in effort terms. The opportunity list is more revealing because it shows where intent is strong without the same competitive drag.

Why it matters: In a search environment shaped by AI summaries, stronger filters and more zero-click behaviour, mid-volume commercial phrases may matter more than ever.

These terms give brands space to build trust and relevance before the biggest terms become realistic. That is another reason On Running’s rise matters. It suggests a brand can still climb in a mature category if it captures the right layers of demand rather than obsessing over the broadest terms first.

Which brands have the strongest trust, reviews and brand reach?

Most reviewed sportswear brands

Brand awareness leaders

What the tables show: Reviews and brand reach tell two different stories. JD Sports and Sports Direct win on review volume, but their average ratings are not especially strong. Sportsshoes.com and Footasylum have fewer reviews, yet better scores. On awareness, Nike still has a huge social advantage and Sports Direct leads on search recall. On Running is still smaller on both counts, which makes its visibility growth even more notable.

Why it matters: A brand does not need to dominate every channel before it starts winning in organic search. It needs a proposition the SERP can understand, pages that meet intent cleanly and enough momentum to turn discovery into recall.

What should sportswear brands take from the 2026 market?

The sportswear market is not flat. It is rebalancing. Generic demand is softening in places. More expressive, specific and crossover searches are rising. Some of the biggest names still own the loudest brand signals, but several are slipping on organic ground. At the same time, focused challengers are proving that search growth still exists for brands that build around tighter intent.

That is why On Running feels important here. Its 34% growth does not just show a winning year. It shows what the next phase of sportswear search may look like: less broad, less dependent on raw authority, and more shaped by product clarity, faster pages, better category framing and demand that starts with a very specific need.

Strategic takeaway: The market is moving from scale-first search to relevance-first search. The brands that adapt quickest to that shift are the ones most likely to keep gaining while older leaders work out why size alone is no longer enough.

What this means for strategy in practice

1. Build around tighter intent clusters. Sportswear search is breaking into more specific use cases and style-led journeys. Brands that organise pages around these hybrid intents will be easier to discover and easier to trust.
2. Use technical performance as a growth lever. Faster category and product pages do more than support rankings. They reduce drop-off during comparison-heavy journeys and help preserve conversion.
3. Make category language more exact. Shoppers are searching through colour, silhouette, occasion and fit, not just broad product nouns. Taxonomy and content need to reflect that reality.
4. Turn authority into useful page relevance. Legacy brands often have the links but not always the best commercial answer. Challenger brands can still outrun them by being more precise.
5. Prioritise discoverability before dominance. On Running’s growth suggests the path up is not always through the biggest keywords first. It often starts by owning the right layers of demand.

Ready to improve your visibility in sportswear search? Get in touch with our team to discuss how we can help your brand compete.

Method note: Visibility figures reflect relative organic search performance across ranking keyword sets and are best used for market comparison rather than direct analytics replacement. Brand demand, authority, reviews and page speed should be read together, because sportswear search performance now depends less on one dominant signal and more on how those signals reinforce each other.