100+ Brands Featured
Market Decline YoY
Biggest % Grower
Product Search Drop
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The UK's No.1 Sexual Wellness Industry Report
Between early 2025 and early 2026, the UK sexual wellness market declined 2.6% in aggregate organic search visibility, a fall of 108,570 visits across the brands we track. Over the same twelve months the largest brands became better known. Ann Summers grew its monthly brand searches by more than 120,000, the highest brand awareness figure we have recorded for the sector, while Lovehoney held 450,000 monthly brand searches, the second largest in the market.
Those two figures together show how the market changed over the year: brand awareness concentrated among the established names, while organic search visibility spread toward the challengers. The visibility that moved between brands is product discovery traffic: the visits that happen when someone searches for a specific type of product and lands on whichever site has the most relevant page for that query.
Across the dataset, eleven smaller brands took organic visibility share directly from the top two over the period. The leaders kept their ranking position on brand recognition while their share of clicks for non-brand product searches declined. For any brand planning its 2026 search budget, this raises a direct question: does brand investment still lift organic rankings? In this market over the last year, the brands that grew their brand searches still lost organic visibility share to smaller competitors.
The three highest-authority brands in the sector all declined in organic search visibility over the year. Ann Summers fell 9.8%, Lovehoney fell 9.7% and Bondara fell 10.9%. In absolute terms the drops are sharper: Ann Summers lost 53,724 visits and Lovehoney lost 83,455. Brand search moved in the opposite direction. Ann Summers grew brand searches 22.4%, an increase of 123,000 a month and the largest brand search share in the sector, while Lovehoney held flat at 450,000 monthly searches, the second highest.
The combined brand search share of the top two rose from 67.3% to 72.9%, a gain of 5.6 percentage points. Over the same period their combined organic visibility share fell from 33.3% to 30.8%, a loss of 2.45 percentage points. For most of the last decade brand awareness and organic visibility rose and fell together, because Google rewarded the authority that brand investment built. Over the last twelve months in this sector the two measures separated and moved in opposite directions.
This matters for budgeting because it breaks an assumption many teams still plan around: that spending on brand awareness pulls organic rankings up with it. The duopoly spent twenty years building recognition and still lost product discovery visibility to smaller competitors. Branded search demand remains strong and continues to serve navigational queries, sending people who already know these brands straight to their sites. For non-brand product queries, that branded demand stopped lifting organic rankings.
While the leaders declined, eleven smaller brands gained organic visibility share from the top two over the year. Sinful.co.uk grew 163.7%, an increase of 69,592 visits and the largest absolute gain in the market, while its brand searches grew 50%, from 3,600 to 5,400 a month. Simply Pleasure grew 252.6% and Pulse & Cocktails grew 101%. All three have weaker brand recognition and a thinner backlink profile than Ann Summers or Lovehoney, and they grew regardless.
What these brands have in common is how their sites are built. They run more granular product taxonomies, three-level URL hierarchies, and category pages that target a specific search intent instead of sending every visitor into one broad listing of hundreds of products. When someone searches a precise product type, Google ranks the site that has a dedicated page built for that exact query ahead of a broad category listing.
The growth these challengers are taking is mostly product discovery traffic that used to land on the market leaders. Sinful added 69,592 visits while Lovehoney lost 83,455 across the same market and the same twelve months. That single comparison shows traffic moving off the established category pages and onto the challenger pages, which answer the specific query more directly. For a mid-tier brand with a capable technical team, deeper product taxonomy is buildable in months, which is why it is worth starting now.
Product keyword search volume fell 18.6% year-on-year. The browsing and informational queries that used to sit at the top of the funnel, searches like ‘best vibrators’, ‘types of sex toys’ and ‘gift ideas for couples’, are leaving Google for TikTok, Reddit, YouTube and, increasingly, large language models. Buyers now do that research elsewhere and arrive at Google later in the journey, when they already know what they want.
The queries that stayed on Google grew more transactional. Brand keyword search volume grew 3.7% year-on-year, navigational demand held intact with 673,000 people a month typing ‘ann summers’ into Google, and specific product queries grew alongside them, with ‘vibro panties’ up 22% year-on-year. Across all three, people arrive at Google ready to buy a named product type, having already done their browsing elsewhere.
For search strategy this means two separate jobs. Brand keyword demand is driven by awareness investment and flows to whichever brand the searcher already has in mind. Product keyword demand is driven by how a site is built and the content on it, and it flows to whichever site holds the most relevant page for the exact query. The two now need different inputs and different metrics, so running them as one programme hides which of them is actually moving visibility. The brands that rebuilt their sites around precise product intent are the ones taking share, and the keyword data from the last year confirms it.
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