Is the report really free?

Yes. We give them away because the only thing we need from you is your email. No payment, no credit card, no catch.

How fresh is the data?

We refresh every report twice a year. The 2026 Toy Stores Index uses data collected in May 2026, for the period May 2025-May 2026.

Why isn't my brand in the top 100?

Unfortunately, due to the nature of the beast, we cannot gather data for every single website that ranks for a toy stores keyword and considers itself a toy stores brand. We rank the 100 largest by organic visibility in the UK. However, if yours isn’t there, we’re more than happy to gather some data for you using the full range of tools at our disposal. If you’d like custom data, get in touch. Request custom data

Will you put me in a sales sequence?

No. We are committed to making this report the single best free asset for in-house toy stores marketers. Our sector reports are far removed from a lead magnet. That said, it’s impossible for us to share all the insights that can be gleaned from the data in the PDF alone. We will follow up with additional analysis, written by us, sharing our thoughts on the data based on our 15 years of experience as the search agency behind some of the UK’s biggest brands. This often includes analysis of where search marketing is going within the industry and brand spotlights, where we break down why we think certain brands are doing well. We maintain that you can unsubscribe from this additional content if you wish. It will never be a sales push, only ever added value.

Can you do a bespoke version for my brand?

Yes. We spend tens of thousands of pounds a year on top-of-the-line software, tools and proprietary systems that we have at our fingertips, and are more than happy to help you with your data needs. Get in touch with a brief. Request custom data

2026 Toy Stores Industry Report

The Salience Index benchmarks the brands in each UK sector on organic search, reviews, and social. Download this report to see how your brand compares with the competition on search visibility and growth.

Toy Stores Industry Analysis

Across the 338 toy retail and toy brand domains we track, organic search visibility rose 5.00% year-on-year between May 2025 and May 2026. On its own, 5.00% reads like steady gains spread evenly across the sector. The distribution tells a much narrower story.

Three domains hold most of the visibility between them: smythstoys.com on 4,955,080 points, lego.com on 2,183,166 and jellycat.com on 1,824,511, which is 8,962,757 points combined, roughly two-thirds of everything we measure. Their combined gain over the year came to about 898,200 points, larger than the sector’s entire net change. The three biggest domains captured almost all of the year’s organic growth, and the 335 domains behind them finished close to flat.

Before reading anything into that, we removed a handful of domains whose visibility collapsed through de-indexation or site migration rather than lost demand. brio.co.uk and diecastmodels.co.uk fell to zero, toysforapound.com dropped 99.95%, shop.hasbro.com fell 97.68% and funkoeurope.com fell 96.40% as their pages dropped out of Google’s index. Stripping out roughly 294,000 points of mechanical loss still leaves the long tail close to flat, which tells us the 5.00% figure reflects real demand and, if anything, understates it. For anyone planning category or content work in toy retail, the growth available to most individual domains sat well below the 5.00% headline.

What separates the toy brands that grew from the ones that declined is how their demand starts. Brands that people search for by name kept compounding their visibility. Retailers that depend on generic category queries gave ground to a Google that increasingly answers those queries inside an AI Overview or on the results page itself, so users never click through to the retailer.

jellycat.com carries 823,000 branded searches a month (Brand Reach rank 2) and grew 35.92%. pokemoncenter.com, with 60,500 branded searches, grew 63.68% as the trading-card boom sent people searching its name directly. smythstoys.com, on 450,000 branded searches, grew 8.39%. Each of these domains owns a steady volume of people typing its name into Google, and that demand is largely insulated from zero-click behaviour.

The other side of the table has thin branded demand. thetoyshop.com has only 9,900 branded searches (Brand Reach rank 22) and fell 20.88%, a drop of 133,231 visibility points and the single biggest loss of real search demand anywhere in the sector. elc.co.uk, also on 9,900 branded searches, fell 28.40%. shopping.mattel.com, with just 10 branded searches a month (Brand Reach rank 45), fell 37.36%; its visitors arrive by searching ‘Barbie’ or ‘Hot Wheels’ and then buy from Amazon, Argos or Smyths, so when the store slipped on generic product queries there was no name demand to make up the shortfall. When a domain depends on generic rankings and has little name demand of its own, a contested results page is where it loses visibility.

Underneath the 5.00% sector average, two category clusters grew two to fifteen times faster than the market. Board games and puzzles is the first: ravensburger.co.uk grew 51.76%, asmodee.co.uk 49.03%, alljigsawpuzzles.co.uk 39.73% and puzzlesgalore.co.uk 33.96%. These are searches with clear product intent, and the winning pages tend to carry real content depth and convert through well-structured product detail pages rather than broad category landing pages.

Educational, craft and STEM ranges form the second cluster. brightminds.co.uk grew 74.88%, crafts4kids.co.uk 58.78%, shop.sciencemuseum.org.uk 57.26% and educationaltoys.co.uk 35.97%. Parents and gift-buyers search these terms with a specific outcome in mind, and the retailers ranking for them tend to publish genuine guidance, buying guides, age-appropriateness explainers and FAQ schema, rather than thin category copy.

Classic mid-market, multi-category and baby-toy incumbents moved the other way. elc.co.uk fell 28.40%, magicmadhouse.co.uk fell 30.61%, scandiborn.co.uk fell 33.51% and bigjigstoys.co.uk fell 56.70%. Several different retailers of the same type fell together, which reads as a category movement rather than one company’s weak year. These are the domains most exposed to generic head terms, and a results page that answers the query without sending anyone on to the retailer hurts them most. The room to grow now sits in the intent-rich clusters the biggest brands have not bothered to cover well, where a focused specialist can still rank.

One detail in the data is worth flagging for anyone deciding where to invest. The highest-visibility toy brands carry the worst customer ratings. smythstoys.com sits on 2.3 stars, lego.com on 1.9, disneystore.co.uk on 1.5, hamleys.com on 1.4, shopping.mattel.com on 1.3 and pokemoncenter.com on 1.2. The high-trust specialists rank far lower in search: waylandgames.co.uk holds 4.9 stars across 58,838 reviews, modelsport.co.uk 4.9 on 45,687 reviews, goblingaming.co.uk 4.9 on 23,987 reviews and brightminds.co.uk 4.7.

We should be careful with this: the review data covers only the top 20 sites by review count, so it is not a verdict on the whole sector. Within that group, scale and customer satisfaction are running in opposite directions, and several of the highly rated specialists are already among the fastest growers we measured in the board games, puzzles and STEM clusters.

For a specialist, that gap is an opening. Strong review volume and genuine category authority are exactly the trust signals Google and AI Overviews increasingly weigh when they decide which domain to cite. A retailer with 9,900 branded searches and a 4.9-star reputation can hold a more durable position than a far larger brand whose customers rate it 1.3, because the smaller brand is steadily building the review credibility that those systems reward.

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