Google search trends for the cycling industry: 2018 to present

Last updated: September 2022

Keeping on top of search trends is an important and ongoing activity. It not only allows you to assess the performance of your digital marketing activities against, for example, search behaviour, it also provides you with invaluable insight into how major events – think Covid-19 and the cost of living crisis – affect consumer behaviour.

This report, one of many we deliver on specific categories and industries, looks to give those of you involved in the cycling industry a broad overview of search trends relating to different types of bikes.

Every month we track and record the amount of searches made on google.co.uk relating to the cycling industry across five types of bicycles:

• electric bikes
• mountain bikes
• gravel bikes
• road bikes
• cyclocross bikes

This equates to over 3 million monthly searches and over 12,000 unique keywords (depending upon the time of year).

This includes more general keywords such as ‘gravel bikes’, which is searched for over 18,000 times per month on average.

It also includes more specific keywords. Again, relating to gravel bikes, you’ll find branded terms like ‘specialized diverge’, which is searched for over 2,900 times per month on average.

And it features popular questions, too, such as ‘what is a gravel bike?’, which is searched for 720 times per month on average.

By aggregating this data on a monthly basis, we can see how demand rises and falls for different types of bikes and start using that insight to make informed commercial decisions.

General trends

Demand is seasonal

Bicycle search demand tends to be seasonal. Generally, there is a notable uptick in search for bikes as the weather gets warmer, starting in May and peaking in July.

Niche bikes are growing in popularity

Over the past few years, interest in certain types of bikes has grown. In particular, gravel bikes and electric bikes are growing in popularity, with consistent year-on-year search growth since 2018.

The electric age

In May 2022, the most searched for category of bike was electric, overtaking mountain bikes for the first time (which had been the highest search term for bikes for the previous four years).

Notable dates

March 2020: first Covid-19 lockdown

Demand for bikes exploded between April and May 2020. There were a couple of reasons for this.

One, April was, as the Met Office later confirmed it, the sunniest on record for the UK. And two,  it was also the height of the first lockdown. Cycling not only felt like a safe way of getting around, it was also a way of exercising.

May 2022: cost of living crisis

The cost of living crisis, which is impacting on all aspects of life, has seen demand for bikes fall lower than that of 2021 – comparing May 2022 vs May 2021, search demand was down by 20.6% (3.34 million searches vs 4.21 million searches).

That said, there are still more searches being made in 2022 than in 2018 and 2019 respectively, suggesting that interest in bikes is greater than it has ever been.

Note

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