UK search interest in the phrase "Black Friday" has fallen 36% from its 2019 level, while searches asking when the sales start and end have climbed 39%, according to an analysis of 19 search terms that Halifax-based search marketing agency Marketing Signals circulated on October 14, 2026, six weeks before Black Friday falls on November 27.

In Short

Fewer people in the UK are typing "Black Friday" into search engines than in 2019, but more of them are asking when the sales begin and finish. That matters to companies that pay for search ads, because many still pile their budget into the one weekend when ad slots are most contested. The data suggests shoppers spread their hunting across November, though the figures are estimates from one agency and were not published with a full method.

What the analysis measured

Marketing Signals, an agency that sells pay-per-click, SEO and digital PR services, said it analysed UK search volumes and estimated cost-per-click data across 19 major Black Friday terms between November 2019 and November 2025. The comparison is therefore a six-year one, from the November before the pandemic to the most recent completed season.

Three declines sit at the centre of the findings. According to Marketing Signals, core "Black Friday" search demand is down 36% on its 2019 peak. Deal-related terms fell 40% over the same period. Retailer-specific sale queries - searches pairing a shop's name with the sale - fell furthest, by 68%.

Against those drops, one group grew. Search queries tracking promotional dates rose 39%, according to the agency, and a single phrase within that group, "when does Black Friday end", rose 439%. The pitch does not give absolute volumes for any term, so a percentage of that size cannot be read as evidence that the phrase is now large. It may simply have started from a small base.

The agency's reading of the numbers is blunt. "In short, shoppers are still looking for deals, but they're spreading their search across November, with some starting as early as late October, and searching for brands and products more than broad Black Friday phrases," the company wrote. "Budgets built around a single weekend may be chasing demand that has already moved."

What the pitch does not say

Several gaps limit how far the figures can be pushed. The pitch names Semrush as the source of the cost-per-click numbers, stating that "CPCs are Semrush market estimates for each search term, and not what any brands actually paid." It does not name the source of the search volume data, list the 19 terms, or explain how terms were assigned to the "core", "deal-related", "retailer-specific" and "timing" groups.

The email refers readers to "the full report, including the CPC table and methodology" via a link that does not appear in the copy PPC Land received. A check of the insights section of the Marketing Signals website on October 15 found no Black Friday report among the posts listed there. The methodology could not be reviewed.

The time frame raises a further question. Keyword research tools generally report monthly volumes, and the study's window runs November to November. A monthly total can show that Black Friday searching shrank in November; it cannot by itself show that searching moved into late October or spread across the weeks of November. That part of the conclusion is the agency's interpretation rather than a figure it published. There is also a tension inside the findings: the agency says shoppers search "for brands and products more", yet the only retailer-related number it gives, the 68% fall in retailer-specific sale queries, points the other way. Product and brand searches outside the Black Friday phrase set were not quantified.

The 12bn figure is a forecast, and an outdated one

The pitch frames the search data against spending. "While UK Q4 advertising spend grew by 7.3% to £12 billion over the 2025 festive period, according to recent AA/WARC figures," the agency wrote, consumer search interest in Black Friday "has dropped by 36% since 2019."

Those two numbers come from a forecast, not an outturn. The Advertising Association and WARC published the £12.0 billion figure on October 30, 2025, as a prediction for the final quarter of that year, describing an expected 7.3% year-on-year rise and an £814 million boost against Q4 2024. At the time the AA/WARC Expenditure Report also forecast that search would grow 11.2% in Q4 2025 and account for 40% of spend in the quarter, a definition that included retail media.

The actual figures came later and were larger. According to the AA/WARC report released on April 29, 2026, advertisers committed £12.9 billion to UK media in Q4 2025, up 8% year on year. That edition used a revised methodology in which search is reported excluding retail media. On that basis, search grew 8.6% in the quarter, while retail media rose 30.5%, addressable TV 26.9% and social media, including YouTube, 22%.

For full-year 2025, AA/WARC put UK advertising investment at £46.7 billion, up 6.4%, with search holding the largest share at 38.3% after growing 5.8%. PPC Land reported in May that the UK ad market grew 6.4% while two in three pounds went to Google, Meta and Amazon. The same AA/WARC release forecast growth of 6.6% to £49.8 billion in 2026.

The distinction matters for the agency's argument. Its premise is that money keeps flowing into Q4 while the phrase that defines the season loses search interest. The outturn data strengthens the spending side of that contrast, since the quarter came in nearly £1 billion above the forecast the pitch cites. But the shift of retail media out of the search category also means Q4 search spending figures from the two releases are not directly comparable, and neither AA/WARC figure isolates Black Friday campaigns or Black Friday keywords.

Clicks are cheap; the products are not equal

The cost side of the study rests on Semrush estimates. According to Marketing Signals, most Black Friday clicks across its 19 terms were estimated to cost between 35p and £1.10. The highest absolute estimate in the set belonged to the travel query "black friday holiday deals", at an average of £1.44 per click.

The agency then set click costs against the price of the product being sold. According to the pitch, a Gymshark click costs around 33 times more than a PS5 click relative to the product's price. Expressed another way, the Black Friday price of a PS5 would cover around 1,050 clicks, against around 32 for a pair of Gymshark leggings. The two counts are consistent with the stated ratio, since 1,050 divided by 32 is roughly 33. The pitch does not state which Black Friday prices were used for either product.

Laura Salini, head of PPC and client success at Marketing Signals, said the effect is not only relative. "Lower-priced products feel this the most. A click on a Gymshark search, for example, costs more than one on a PS5 search, even though the leggings sell for a fraction of the price," she said. "There's much less room for wasted spend on cheaper products, so tight keyword targeting in lower-priced categories like clothing matters even more."

The comparison is about headroom rather than profitability. A click priced at a few pence on a console worth several hundred pounds leaves a large margin for clicks that do not convert; a click near £1 on clothing priced in the tens of pounds leaves very little. The figures do not account for conversion rates, margins, basket size or repeat purchases, all of which shape whether a click pays back. They also reflect market estimates. Actual auction prices vary by advertiser, Quality Score, bid strategy and time of day, and they typically rise sharply in the days around Black Friday itself, which a November monthly average smooths out.

Context from elsewhere points to rising costs. Channable data covered by PPC Land showed advertisers losing 46% ROAS on Performance Max as Google clicks cost more, based on 1.38 billion euros of European e-commerce spend, with cost-per-click up 15% between June 2025 and June 2026. WordStream's US benchmarks put the average Google Ads CPC at $5.42 across 13,474 search campaigns, although that figure spans all industries and is not comparable with the Black Friday terms in the Marketing Signals set.

What the agency says advertisers are getting wrong

Salini framed the findings around planning cycles. "Black Friday is still a huge moment for UK retail, but the way people search for it has definitely changed. Fewer people are typing in generic phrases like 'Black Friday deals', and more are asking when the sales start and finish," she said.

"That matters for advertisers because a lot of Q4 planning is still built around Black Friday weekend itself. If demand is spread across November, putting most of the budget into a few days means competing for clicks when ad space is usually most contested, and potentially missing the shoppers who started looking earlier."

The pitch closes with a list of recommendations from Salini. They include planning budgets around November rather than one weekend, putting sale start and end dates in ad copy and landing pages, weighting product, category and brand terms above broad Black Friday phrases, and judging November and December results together. The last point targets a familiar measurement problem: whether Black Friday activity creates sales or pulls forward purchases that would have happened before Christmas anyway. That is a question of incrementality, and the agency's data, which covers search volumes and click costs but not sales, does not answer it.

The recommendation to rely on the search terms report to see which queries convert also runs into a recent change. PPC Land reported in May that Google's search terms report now shows AI intent, not what users typed, for searches arriving through Lens, AI Mode, AI Overviews and auto-complete. Where a shopper's query is rewritten into an inferred intent, the line between a broad "Black Friday deals" search and a product search becomes harder to see in reporting, and the match type set on a keyword no longer fully describes which queries it served.

Why the search pattern matters now

The Marketing Signals data adds a UK search angle to a run of surveys that point in the same direction. Google's own holiday guidance, covered by PPC Land in November 2025, stated that 34% of consumers began holiday shopping in October or earlier and that promotions now span several months rather than clustering on specific dates.

Retail calendars have stretched as well. Amazon set Prime Big Deal Days for October 6-7 across 22 countries, including the UK, putting a major discount event seven weeks ahead of Black Friday. In the US, Simon-Kucher found that only 52% of consumers still see Black Friday as the main venue for the best deals, down from 60% in 2025, as households plan to cut holiday budgets 5.5%. A Tatari survey shared by VAB found that 54% of 41 clients plan holiday TV ads before mid-November.

The rise in "when does Black Friday end" searches also connects to regulatory scrutiny of how sales are timed. In Australia, the competition regulator fined James Lane and Vuly $59,400 over sales that ran past end dates, including a Black Friday 2025 sale whose end date was allegedly planned to be extended in advance. Shoppers asking when a sale finishes are asking a question that retailers do not always answer consistently.

There is a commercial undercurrent too. Kantar research presented in October found that 75% of UK consumer goods marketers could not say whether their price promotions pay. A season built on a single discount weekend is one of the most visible forms of that habit.

On the platform side, Google has added tools that assume temporary spikes. Promotion mode, launched in beta for Search and Performance Max in June, lets advertisers schedule ROAS tolerance changes and extra budget for fixed date ranges, with Black Friday cited as a typical use. Two years ago, a poll of 169 practitioners found that 65% of advertisers use Google Ads seasonality adjustments for Black Friday sales. If demand is spread more thinly across the month, as Marketing Signals argues, short-window bidding adjustments capture a smaller share of it.

Not all evidence points to the generic phrase losing value for advertisers in the same way. Adthena's analysis of 29.1 million queries found that seasonal, event-driven searches such as "Black Friday deals" under-index for AI Overview ad placements, which concerns where ads appear rather than how many people search. Both findings sit alongside the broader spending picture, in which retail media - the fastest-growing Q4 channel in the AA/WARC outturn at 30.5% - gives retailers a retail media network inventory that captures product searches on their own sites, outside the Google auctions the Semrush estimates describe.

How far the findings travel

The study is a vendor analysis produced by an agency that sells the services it recommends, and its figures carry the limits that come with that. Its strongest numbers - the 36%, 40% and 68% declines and the 39% rise in date queries - are directional measures of keyword volume across a set of terms the agency selected and has not published. Its cost figures are modelled estimates that its own pitch says are not what brands paid. And the spending context it leans on is a year-old forecast that the AA/WARC outturn has since superseded with a higher number under a different method.

What survives those caveats is a pattern consistent with other sources: fewer people treat "Black Friday" as a search phrase in itself, and more treat it as a date to check. For UK advertisers planning a quarter that AA/WARC measured at £12.9 billion last year, the open question is whether the money follows the calendar or the searches.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Marketing Signals, a UK search marketing agency based in Halifax, with comment from Laura Salini, its head of PPC and client success. Spending figures come from the Advertising Association and WARC; click cost estimates come from Semrush.

What: An analysis of 19 UK Black Friday search terms found core "Black Friday" searches down 36% from 2019, deal-related terms down 40% and retailer-specific sale queries down 68%, while searches about sale dates rose 39%. Estimated clicks mostly cost 35p to £1.10, with "black friday holiday deals" highest at £1.44. The pitch's "£12 billion, up 7.3%" Q4 figure is an October 2025 AA/WARC forecast; the outturn was £12.9 billion, up 8%.

When: Marketing Signals circulated the analysis on October 14, 2026. The data covers November 2019 to November 2025. Black Friday 2026 falls on November 27.

Where: The United Kingdom, across search engines, with click cost estimates from Semrush.

Why: Fewer UK shoppers search the generic Black Friday phrase and more search for sale dates, which the agency argues leaves budgets concentrated on one weekend competing for the most expensive clicks. The data source for search volumes, the 19 terms and the full method were not published, so the findings remain vendor estimates.