It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Peak Season

For marketers this means peak is just around the corner and we are sat creating content around the ‘c word’ (surely it can’t be Christmas, already)!

It might feel early, but apparently, customers didn’t get the memo. Peak shopping is already creeping further and further forward, with people starting their research up to eight weeks before Cyber Week.

So while we’re still debating whether it’s socially acceptable to mention Christmas, plenty of people have already started deciding what they’re going to buy.

And deciding is the important bit here, because that journey looks very different now. A search for “what on earth do I buy Dad this year?” might start on Google, move to TikTok, involve a quick ChatGPT recommendation, a Reddit thread, three reviews and far too much time comparing air fryers before anything actually makes it into the basket.

Black Friday still has its big moment, of course, but peak search is happening long before the deals land and long after Cyber Monday is over. In fact, 40% of peak shopping now happens after Cyber Week.

So, rather than another guide telling you to dust off the Black Friday landing page, we’re looking at the whole peak search journey: where people are looking, what they’re looking for and how to make sure your brand is there when they do.

We hate to be the ones to tell you this, but while most of us are still firmly in “it’s far too early to think about Christmas” territory, your customers might already be several steps ahead.

Peak has been getting longer for a while, and 2026 looks set to push things earlier again, with the average holiday conversion journey now taking 52 days.

That doesn’t mean everyone has suddenly become one of those terrifyingly organised people who have all their presents bought and wrapped by Halloween.

It means the thinking starts earlier. People are browsing, saving ideas, comparing products, researching brands and working out what they actually want long before they’re ready to part with their money.

And we can see that build-up in search itself. Google Trends data for “Christmas gifts” throughout 2025 shows interest starting to creep upwards through autumn, before gathering pace and eventually hitting that festive peak in November and December.

For marketers, that earlier interest matters. Someone searching “Christmas gifts for a dad who has everything” in October needs something very different from the person searching “Christmas gifts next day delivery” on the 21st December. One is looking for inspiration, whilst the other is hoping Father Christmas has access to DPD.

And Christmas Day isn’t the finish line either. Boxing Day demand is predicted to grow 4.3% year on year. Twixmas “near me” searches are expected to be 8% higher than in 2025, and January now represents a peak traffic and spending level similar to October.

So perhaps the first thing we need to change about peak search is the calendar we’re planning around. October to January is the opportunity, and what people are searching for and what they need from your brand changes considerably along the way.

You could have the best Christmas campaign of your career, but it isn’t going to do much for revenue if your website falls over the second everyone turns up.

Peak readiness should therefore include agreeing on a deployment freeze well before your festive campaigns go live. For ecommerce brands, that could mean pausing planned development throughout peak and into January, with only urgent deployments going live.

It’s also worth agreeing when everyone is going to stop tinkering. Launching a redesign, changing your navigation or making major template changes immediately before your busiest trading period is one way to make the office Christmas party conversation slightly awkward.

Get the foundations sorted early, test properly and make sure SEO, Paid and Dev all know what is changing before it changes. Future-you, watching the Black Friday dashboard, will be grateful.

A gift guide for every event (Christmas, Mothers Day, Valentines) and even one for every single year. Stop! Optimise last year’s, redirect the old ones to the most recent, or do something completely out of the box. 

Think about everything someone wants to know between “I need to buy Mum something for Christmas” and actually getting their card out. They might need inspiration at first, but then come the comparisons, reviews, sizing questions, delivery dates, returns policies and the “is this actually worth the money?” search before committing.

That gives us a lot more to work with than another Top 10 Christmas Gifts for 2026 article. Buying guides, product comparisons, useful FAQs, properly optimised category and product pages, reviews and delivery information can all capture different parts of that journey. And unlike a hastily published Christmas blog, plenty of that content can continue earning its keep once the tree is back in the loft.

What are they researching early? What questions keep cropping up? Where are they comparing their options? And, importantly, what have you already got sitting on your site that could be improved rather than creating yet another /christmas-gift-guide-2026/ URL destined to be forgotten about by January?

But the best peak content strategy should do much more than help someone find you when they already know what they want. It should help them decide what they want in the first place.

Black Friday is important and nobody here is suggesting you casually ignore one of the biggest retail moments of the year. But if your Paid strategy is essentially save the budget, wait for Black Friday and turn everything up, then 2025 gave us a pretty good reason to rethink it.

Last year, Google predicted Black Friday demand would be flat. It actually grew by 8%. Cyber Monday was also expected to be flat and came in 10% higher, while December went from a predicted 7% decline to 6% growth. 

That creates two jobs for Paid teams in 2026.

The getting-in-early bit is particularly important. Shoppers can start researching up to eight weeks before Cyber Week, which means waiting until November to start building audiences leaves an awful lot of useful intent on the table.

This year, our Paid team will be leaning much more heavily on auction insights to understand who’s capturing demand, alongside flexible budgets and Google’s peak trading tools to react when opportunities appear.

AI is getting a bigger seat at the Paid table too. The 2026 approach includes strengthening first-party data, using AI-powered targeting and making use of newer Google features such as promo mode, pricing insights and budget boost to help campaigns respond to what’s actually happening rather than what we thought might happen three months earlier.

So yes, have a Black Friday budget. Just don’t spend October sitting on it waiting for the starting gun. By then, your customers are already shopping with your competitors.

Now for the slightly less glamorous part of peak. Nobody is sitting around the Christmas marketing brainstorm saying “do you know what would really bring this campaign to life? Some structured data.” (well maybe the Flaunt Tech Team are…) 

But unfortunately, it matters.

You can have the best Black Friday campaign, beautiful creative and a Paid budget ready to go, but if Google can’t find the page, your internal linking is all over the place or the product information being pulled through is wrong, we’ve got a problem.

So, before peak properly kicks off, do the boring checks. 

• Can search engines actually find and index your seasonal pages? 
• Are they included in your XML sitemap?
• Are they linked from somewhere other than a random blog from 2022? 
• Are your canonicals pointing where they should be? 
• Is your structured data accurate? 
• Are product prices, availability and offers actually matching what customers can see on the page?

It’s not going to win any awards for festive creativity, but it will make everything else you’re spending time and money on work a lot harder. And while I’m already on my seasonal-content soapbox, please don’t delete everything when Christmas is over.

If you’ve got a page that has spent years building rankings, links and authority, keep it. Refresh it when peak rolls back around, update the offer and let it carry on doing its job rather than binning it on 1st Jan and asking SEO to start again next October.

The same goes for products that sell out. 

I know the temptation is to hit delete the second the final one leaves the warehouse, but if that page is bringing people onto the site, removing it completely can take all of that lovely search visibility with it.

None of this is particularly Christmassy, I know. But finding out three days before Black Friday that Google can’t find the landing page you’ve spent the last two months planning is definitely not the kind of festive surprise anyone asked for.

Okay, so we’ve sorted the content on your website. Lovely. Now we need to talk about what everyone else is saying about you.

When someone asks ChatGPT “what are the best headphones to buy my boyfriend for Christmas?”, the answer isn’t simply going to be whichever brand has squeezed “best headphones Christmas gift” into a category page the most times.

AI is adding another layer to how people research and compare products during peak. 

These systems can be looking at everything from your product information and reviews to the wider signals that help them understand whether your brand is actually worth recommending. Which means we need to care about what exists beyond our website too.

• What are publications saying about you? 
• Are your products appearing in reviews and round-ups? 
• Are journalists turning to your experts for commentary? 
• Are people recommending you in relevant communities? 
• Are people talking about you on social media? 
• Are there credible sites connecting your brand with the products and topics you want to be known for?

And yes, after my rant in the last section, I’m about to mention gift guides again. But this time, I want somebody else to write it.

Getting your product into a publisher’s Christmas gift guide, a best of round-up or a genuinely useful review can give you a lovely brand mention, link, referral traffic and brand exposure, but its value doesn’t necessarily end there anymore. It becomes another piece of the wider picture showing search engines, AI platforms and, most importantly, actual people that other people know, trust and recommend your brand. So while we’re all busy obsessing over what our own websites say during peak, don’t forget to look at what the rest of the internet is saying too.  

I’m going to say something that probably won’t shock anyone who has lost an hour of their evening to TikTok: 

They’re searching there too.

A question that keeps appearing in TikTok comments could become a piece of content. A product suddenly getting loads of attention might change your Paid priorities. A Reddit conversation could spark a PR story. UGC can tell you which messages actually resonate with customers, while the language people naturally use can uncover search opportunities we’d never find by staring at a keyword tool all day.

Social listening is search research too. It just involves a lot more scrolling and the occasional accidental discovery that you apparently need an air fryer with two drawers.

You know the one. Black background. White text. 20% OFF. Maybe a red sticker, a countdown clock, or a bit of gold if we’re feeling particularly festive.

Every. Single. Year.

Now, I’m not saying bin the Black Friday graphics altogether. People want to know there’s an offer, and sometimes 20% OFF really is the most important thing you need to tell them. But if that’s the only creative idea we’ve got from October through to January, we might have a problem.

The person having a casual browse for Christmas ideas in October is in a very different headspace to me on 22nd December searching “Christmas presents with next day delivery PLEASE.” And yet, far too often, we’re showing both of them essentially the same thing.

Then, when November arrives, bring in the offers. December? Tell me it’s in stock, when it’s arriving and whether I’ve missed the last delivery date. And January is another chance to change things up again, whether that’s sales, new launches, Christmas-money spending or giving all those lovely new customers a reason to come back.

When it comes to paid, the strategy moves from prospecting and awareness in the earlier stages, through offer-led messaging and heavier retargeting in November, before switching to fast-delivery, stock and cut-off messaging in December and retention and cross-selling in January.

So please, make the Black Friday graphic. Just don’t make it in September and expect it to do all the work until January.

Every year, John Lewis drops its Christmas advert and, like clockwork, we all go looking for it. We search for the advert, watch it again, find out what the song is, Google the products, read articles about it, and send it to the one person in the group chat who somehow hasn’t seen it yet.

None of that demand started with someone waking up and randomly deciding to Google John Lewis. The advert created the search.

Someone can see your billboard on the way to work, hear your brand mentioned on a podcast, walk past an event, spot your product in an influencer’s video or hear your radio ad and think “oh, I actually quite like the sound of that.” What do they do next? Quite often, they search.

Which is why brand campaigns and Search need to work together. If you’re about to spend a small fortune getting your brand in front of people, spend some time thinking about what they’re going to do once you’ve got their attention. What will they type into Google? What might they ask ChatGPT? Can they easily find the product they just saw? Does your website use the same language as the campaign? Does the Paid team know branded demand might be about to jump?

Creating loads of lovely demand and then being impossible to find when someone comes looking for you feels a bit like buying everyone Christmas presents and forgetting where you hid them.

Now we need to talk about everyone’s favourite bit: proving all of this actually worked.

Search used to give us a relatively neat little story. Someone searched, they clicked and then they bought something. We put it in a report and everyone was happy.

Peak 2026? Not quite so tidy.

Someone could see your product on TikTok, forget about it, see you mentioned in an article three days later, Google your brand, ask ChatGPT whether you’re actually any good, read a Reddit thread, disappear for two weeks, click a Paid ad on Black Friday and then completely ruin everyone’s attribution model by coming back directly to buy it.

So… who gets the credit?

We absolutely still need those numbers. But if we’ve just spent an entire blog talking about how people search across more platforms, over a longer period and through far messier journeys, we can’t then judge everything solely by who happened to get the final click.

Look at the bigger signals too. 

• Is branded search increasing? 
• Are more people discovering you through AI platforms? 
• Did demand change after a big campaign launched? 
• Are new customers finding you? 
• Are people engaging with your content and coming back later? 
• What role are assisted conversions playing?

Sometimes, the channel that didn’t get the sale is the reason the customer knew what to search for in the first place. And if we don’t look beyond that final click, there’s a good chance we’ll switch off something that was doing a much bigger job than the report gave it credit for.

If you’ve made it this far and are now staring nervously at your Q4 plan, sorry.

But if there’s one thing to take away from all of this, it’s that peak isn’t something that suddenly happens when Black Friday arrives.

By mid-October, 24% of peak shopping is already complete, 40% happens after Cyber Week and January now represents the same level of traffic and spending as October.

And during those four months, your customer really couldn’t care less which department owns which bit of marketing. They’ll move from TikTok to Google, ChatGPT to Reddit, a TV advert to your website and back again without giving a second thought to whether they’re currently in the SEO, Paid, Social, PR or Content part of their journey.

That’s our problem to worry about, not theirs.

So get the teams talking…

• Get the website ready.
• Start building demand before November. 
• Give people useful things to find when they start researching. 
• Make sure other people are talking about you. 
• Listen to what customers are saying on social. Change the creative as their priorities change. 
• And when it comes to reporting, don’t forget about everything that hap