UK Jewellery, Edition 1, H1 2026

Pandora sits alone at the top. Its 1,687,963 monthly visits are 2.1 times H.Samuel's 801,522, and 26.1% of everything the tracked set earns.

Below it the high street fills the next five places: H.Samuel, Warren James, Beaverbrooks, Ernest Jones and Goldsmiths.

Warren James is the mover in that group, up 26.0% to 651,424 and now third. Ernest Jones is the faller, down 26.9% to 381,751 and holding fifth place over Goldsmiths by 1,207 visits.

The independent brands start at seventh with Astrid & Miyu on 279,162, and the sharpest growth in the set sits lower down the table.

Austen Blake is the story of this edition. A year ago it earned 246 visits a month from the term "engagement rings". In June 2026 it earned 14,585 from the same term, and it holds the first organic position for the largest generic keyword in the sector, 93,000 searches a month, from one of the weakest link profiles in the set. Cherry Diva (+85.7%) built its growth on piercing terms. Its biggest keywords are now helix, septum and conch piercing. Abbott Lyon (+46.1%), Daisy Jewellery (+33.2%) and Carrie Elizabeth (+29.4%) round out the risers, and Warren James (+26.0%) is the only high-street name among the top six growers.

On the other side, Ernest Jones lost 26.9% of its traffic, Tiffany 17.8%, F.Hinds 11.0% and Lovisa 10.1%. Ernest Jones is the one that matters. It is the fifth largest brand in the set, its brand searches fell 41.4% in the same window, and two of its biggest generic terms a year ago, "wedding rings" (10,215 visits) and "gold necklace" (9,459), no longer appear in its top 50 keywords at all. The monthly chart shows H.Samuel is the other name to watch. Its half-year average is up 5.7%, but its June 2026 traffic of 474,895 was 46.0% below June 2025, and it exited the window behind Warren James on monthly traffic for the first time in the 19 months we track.

Crossing organic traffic against demand for each brand's own name separates SEO effects from brand effects. Abbott Lyon is the strongest all-round position in the set: brand demand up 42.2%, traffic up 46.1%, and non-branded traffic up 53.4%, so it is growing on category terms as well as on its name. Ernest Jones is the inverse at every level. Lovisa is the odd one out. Searches for its name rose 17.9% while its organic traffic fell 10.1% and its non-branded traffic fell 42.5%. People want Lovisa more than they did a year ago and Google is sending it less category traffic. That is an SEO problem, not a brand one. Austen Blake's brand searches fell 11.0% while its traffic grew five-fold, so its rise owes nothing to fame. Warren James (brand demand down 8.6%, traffic up 26.0%) and Beaverbrooks (brand demand up 5.1%, traffic up 16.4%) are the high-street names whose SEO is outrunning their brand.

The headline leaderboard is partly a fame contest, so we measured the branded share of every brand's top keywords and estimated what remains. In this sector the re-rank is dramatic. Pandora's top 100 keywords are 96.8% branded. The word "pandora" alone sends it 672,011 visits a month. On our conservative estimate its non-branded traffic is 54,755, which places it fifteenth. The high-street chains take over: H.Samuel on an estimated 510,119 category-driven visits, then Beaverbrooks on 357,516, Goldsmiths on 344,958 and Ernest Jones on 342,403. Goldsmiths and Ernest Jones are around 90% non-branded, so nearly everything they earn from search is earned on rankings, not reputation.

The split also grades the growth. Beaverbrooks's non-branded traffic rose 31.9% while its branded traffic fell 9.8%. Its rankings are doing the work. Daisy Jewellery went from 37.8% branded to 17.1%, with non-branded traffic up 77.5%. It now ranks first for "jewellery" and "earrings", two of the biggest generic terms in the sector, from a domain rating of 51. Carrie Elizabeth made the same move, from 61.6% branded to 29.9%, with non-branded traffic up 136.2%. Astrid & Miyu went the other way. Its branded share rose from 67.2% to 77.1% and its non-branded traffic fell 34.5%. It is leaning harder on its name every month.

Plotting domain rating against estimated non-branded traffic names the over- and under-performers without inventing labels. Three brands punch well above their authority. Austen Blake (DR 31) earns an estimated 143,874 non-branded visits and owns "engagement rings". Cherry Diva (DR 44) nearly doubled its non-branded traffic to 45,048 on piercing terms. Daisy Jewellery (DR 51) ranks first for "jewellery" ahead of H.Samuel and Goldsmiths, both DR 60 or above. The clearest under-performers are the two most authoritative independent brands. Monica Vinader (DR 71) and Missoma (DR 67) hold the second and fourth highest domain ratings in the set, and sit nineteenth and sixteenth on non-branded traffic. Both are more than 57% branded. Authority is not the constraint in this sector. Category-page relevance is, and the brands winning the generic terms are the ones that built pages for them.

Ownership of the money terms is spread across seven different brands, and the order bears little relation to the traffic table. Daisy Jewellery, sixteenth on traffic, ranks first for "jewellery" (74,000 searches) and "earrings" (36,000). Austen Blake, twelfth, ranks first for "engagement rings" (93,000), the largest term in the sector. Abbott Lyon ranks first for "gold necklace", Beaverbrooks for "necklace", H.Samuel for "wedding rings" and Pandora for "tennis bracelet". Warren James, third on traffic, ranks in the top ten for four of the seven terms but holds none of them, which is how a brand builds 651,424 visits without a single marquee position. Outside the set, Oliver Bonas and John Lewis take places on "jewellery", Queensmith and 77 Diamonds on "engagement rings", and Skagen and Thomas Sabo on "necklace". Amazon and Etsy do not appear in the top ten on any of the seven.

The head terms have no AI Overviews yet, but the wider question space does, and DataForSEO's UK dataset records 51,087 AI Overview citations of the 20 tracked domains. The four high-street chains take 48.4% of them between them: H.Samuel 13.7%, Beaverbrooks 13.0%, Goldsmiths 11.7% and Ernest Jones 10.0%. Ernest Jones lost 26.9% of its organic traffic this year and still holds the fourth largest AI citation share, which suggests the AI layer is drawing on catalogue depth and buying guides rather than current rankings.

The independent brands are nearly absent. Missoma has 1.3% of citations, Daisy Jewellery 1.4%, Lovisa 1.6% and Cherry Diva 0.5%. Daisy ranks first for "jewellery" in organic and holds 1.4% of AI citations. That gap between organic rank and AI citation is the widest in the report and the most useful. Diamonds Factory and F.Hinds move the other way: thirteenth and fifteenth on traffic, sixth and eighth on AI citations.

The clearest signal this edition is lab-grown moving from a question to a purchase. The generic research term is falling and the transactional term is rising, from 1,418 to 2,107 searches a month. Tennis bracelets are the biggest absolute mover, up 14.7% to 34,258 monthly searches, with Pandora holding the first organic position. Huggie earrings (+10.5%) and hoop earrings (+7.3%) are both up, and silver necklace (+8.3%) is growing faster than gold necklace (+5.1%).

The two largest category heads are down. "Earrings" fell 16.0% and "necklace" 13.6%, while the metal-qualified versions rose. Shoppers are searching with more intent and less breadth, and the winners are the brands whose category pages match the specific term. "Waterproof jewellery" fell 14.0% and "gold plated jewellery" 12.3%, which suggests the fashion-jewellery material story has cooled. "Engagement rings" slipped 4.5% but at 84,551 searches a month it remains the largest single demand pool in the sector, 25% larger than "jewellery" itself.

High demand and low difficulty rarely sit together, but in this sector the scores say they do. "Tennis bracelet" (36,000 searches, difficulty 1), "necklace" (33,000, difficulty 1) and "gold necklace" (28,000, difficulty 0) are the standouts, and the head-term table shows why: the brands holding them are mid-table names with mid-table authority. "Signet ring" (24,000), "eternity ring" (23,000) and "pearl necklace" (23,000) all score zero. The terms that do score are the ones the chains defend: "engagement rings" at 28, "jewellery" at 25 and "wedding rings" at 23. Everything else in the table is open to a brand with a clean technical base and a category page built for the term.

The tracked set was built from data, not opinion. We started from three anchor brands, H.Samuel, Astrid & Miyu and Missoma, pulled their organic competitors from Ahrefs, and amalgamated the results by keyword overlap to surface the 20 most visible jewellery retailers in UK search. We removed watch-only retailers, generalists such as Oliver Bonas, piercing-only specialists, and luxury houses whose traffic is brand-led and small. Pandora and Tiffany trade on global domains. Their figures are UK-only traffic, filtered by Ahrefs.

The window is January to June 2026 against January to June 2025, six months averaged each side, so a single spiky month does not distort the delta. We report the quarterly split in the introduction because the two quarters disagree, and because an Ahrefs index adjustment in May 2026, seen across other sectors, may weigh on the second quarter. Branded share is measured on each brand's top 50 keywords by traffic (top 100 for Pandora) using a hand-built substring list per brand, applied at June 2025 and June 2026. Because the tail skews non-branded, the non-branded figures are conservative floors.

Search demand and brand-search volumes use Ahrefs monthly volume history for the UK. AI Overview citations use DataForSEO's LLM Mentions dataset for the UK on Google. Keyword difficulty uses DataForSEO, because the Ahrefs difficulty endpoint returned errors on the pull date. Referring-domain history was pulled and discarded. A synchronised rise and fall across unrelated domains between October 2025 and April 2026 is an index adjustment, not link activity. "Permanent jewellery" was removed from the trend tables for a gap in its 2025 volume history. Data pulled 4 September 2026.

We report measured visibility and traffic. We don't estimate revenue, because nobody outside a company's analytics can do that honestly.