IndexWatch 2025: Visibility Winners in Google

From:

Luce Rawlings

Published: 21.01.2026

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To determine how these fluctuations impacted website visibility, we’ve pinpointed and reflected upon the UK’s top-performing domains based on both absolute and percentage gains in SISTRIX’s Visibility Index.

A full, searchable list of 500 domains is included below.

Interested in the domains which have not been so fortunate? You can discover these in our upcoming losers analysis. Other country reports are also available. See below.

Education sector

Heavily invested in informational content, this sector includes the major competitor from Google – AIO. These two sites are winners in visibility, but we’ll be watching them closely during 2026.

ESBCO

Back in Q2, we explored online academic library EBSCOhost’s visibility rise following the March 2025 core update. Fast forward to December, and we can see that the newly introduced /research-starters subfolder’s performance continued to thrive.

The overarching topics that have performed best over the last 12 months are History (blue line), Social Sciences & Humanities (red line) and Biography (green line). Before the March core update, the organic visibility of these sections was nonexistent.

As a result of this section’s growth, ebsco.com’s overall Visibility Index (VI) score has increased by 3,145.63% year on year.

Online Etymology Dictionary

Etymonline.com, the home of the Online Etymology Dictionary, has seen a 1,096.91% increase in visibility vs the previous year. The dictionary provides information about the origin and development of words over time.

Throughout 2025, the website experienced a consistent uplift in organic search prominence, seemingly bolstered by the March, June and December core updates. Despite a notable decline in visibility following the August spam update, levels quickly recovered. By year-end, etymonline.com achieved its highest recorded Visibility Index (VI) score of 33.86. But what exactly contributed to this record-breaking performance?

A deeper dive into etymonline.com’s data confirms that over the past year, ranking URLs have shifted between derivatives or inflections (such as “excruciating”) and their base words (“excruciate”). It appears Google is selecting the single best page to represent the overarching word family, a consolidation that has contributed to improved ranking positions for 101 target keywords.

Automotive

Used cars, new cars, finance and insurance, the sector spans a wide range of industries. Two brands stood out with their website visibility improvements this year.

Cazoo

In 2025, used car retailer Cazoo saw a surge in Google SERP visibility, up 838.06% (+13.33 VI points) year-on-year. This resurgence marks a sharp turnaround from the post-acquisition visibility drop we reported in our Q3 2024 edition.

Towards the end of 2024, we noted that many of Cazoo’s pages were redirected to equivalent URLs on Motors.co.uk – most notably within its top-performing “cars” subfolder. Whilst the Visibility Index reflects a slight uplift for the Motors “used-cars” section between July 2024 and April 2025, the overall gains were not substantial.

However, since the more recent removal of the redirects and the reinstatement of the “car” pages on cazoo.co.uk, the domain’s organic visibility has gradually risen, almost achieving the visibility highs observed pre-acquisition (98% of visibility regained). The June and December core algorithm updates have also supported this subfolder’s recovery.

Vertu Motors

Vertumotors.com is the main website for Vertu Group, a competitor to Cazoo in the used car space. Since December 2024, their Google visibility has continually increased.

In our Q1 2025 analysis, we reflected on the performance of macklinmotors.co.uk, a domain for Macklin Motors (acquired by Vertu in 2010), whose authority has subsequently been merged with the motor group’s main website.

Around the same time, the Bristol Street Motors domain (bristolstreet.co.uk), which was acquired 3 years before Macklin Motors, underwent the same process, consolidating its authority with vertumotors.com.

As a result of this multi-domain project, the Vertu website has seen a 421.69% (+6.3 VI points) uplift in SERP visibility year-on-year, acquired 82,543 new keyword rankings and seen improvements for 33,213 existing ones. Page 1 ranking positions, specifically, rose by 15% during this period.

Home & Garden

This sector includes a mix of informational and commercial content with any projects in the affiliate space.

Wickes

DIY ecommerce platform wickes.co.uk has experienced a 46.16 VI point increase (+143.37% vs the end of December 2024).

Wickes’s SEO presence increased gradually until the end of July. However, between 28th July and 15th September – coinciding with the spam update around 25th August – there was a sudden uptick in domain visibility, resulting in a temporary growth of 202.41%.

Although the peak visibility levels experienced during this period were not maintained, the domain’s overall visibility following the drop remained higher than beforehand.

The success observed at the end of 2025 was a continuation of what we observed in Q3. Optimisations and additions were made to the “products” and “featured” subfolders, leading Google to deem them more useful and offering a better overall experience – consequently improving Wickes’ rankings.

IKEA

Popular, global Swedish home furnishing retailer IKEA experienced a 38.55 VI point increase year-on-year.

Throughout 2025, ikea.com’s category pages experienced steady growth in visibility. This trend was driven by optimisations that led to significant gains across the section, notably within top subcategories including “bookcases” (+42%), “chest-of-drawers” (+39%), and “desks-computer-desks” (+32%).

Key optimisations include the site-wide implementation of an internal search function in the top bar and a new, more extensive visual burger menu. This allows users to navigate product categories as well as access products-by-room pages, offers, on-site design tools and services.

It is also evident from breadcrumb differences between March and December that the site’s page hierarchy changed; this involved a combination of naming convention updates for overarching categories and the implementation of more specific subcategories. This, naturally, resulted in changes to the internal linking between product-based pages.

As a result of these structural and aesthetic changes, user experience and content relevance improved, and this was influential on the domain’s overall rankings, including 15,217 keywords (such as “table”, “office chair” and “buffet”) within the “cat” subfolder seeing position increases and the section also acquire rankings for 9,590 new search queries (including “tupperware”, “backsplash” & “partition wall”).

2025 winners

Check out the full list of winning domains. We have included two tables containing the top domains (absolute and percent). These have been filtered to remove adult content.

Percentage increases:

Search the list to find results.

Absolute increases:

Search the list to find results.

Conclusion

So, we’ve celebrated the 2025 winners…now let’s learn from them! We’ve decoded the success of these high-performing websites and provided some actionable insights below to help your brand thrive in organic search, and to also help navigate future algorithmic shifts in 2026 and beyond:

• Knowledge hubs continue to be fundamental to growth. As highlighted in our analysis of EBSCO, creating high-value informational content, such as “research-starters”, can drive substantial visibility in traditional search and AI-driven results, provided its well structured.
  
• Google is getting better at intent consolidation. For example, in the case of the Online Etymology Dictionary, it opted to prioritise a single best page for word families rather than individual pages based on keyword relevance. This is also a strong indicator of the growing importance of topics broadly, rather than targeting specific keywords.
  
• Temporarily redirecting pages away from a domain carries significant risk, but if the groundwork is completed in advance, website reinstatement can drive immediate recovery. For example, Cazoo regained 98% of the organic authority they had previously built.

• Conversely, consolidating multiple domains through content migration and redirects, when well planned and executed, can yield great rewards. By rolling their acquired domain assets into the main Vertu Motors website, the company saw a significant improvement in their SERP presence.

• Putting usefulness at the forefront of your strategy is one of the best defenses against a negative outcome post-spam update. The optimisations Wickes has made to improve their online product journey – making it more helpful and relevant to users – drove growth following the August spam update and has made their site more resilient against quality-based updates.

• Content accessibility and understandability is crucial to organic search success. Similarly to Wickes, IKEA’s user-first hierarchy, burger menu and internal linking improvements have drastically improved the browsing experience for humans and bots alike, improving search engine rankings and consequently, online discoverability. A clear, logical structure should never be underestimated.

Methodology

Our selection of the top-performing domains is based on the SISTRIX Visibility Index (VI), which assigns scores to each site appearing in UK search results. These scores evaluate organic ranking performance across approximately 100 million keywords spanning a variety of websites on both mobile and desktop devices.

Important note: The Visibility Index reflects algorithmic shifts only; it does not account for external influences such as seasonality, events, national holidays or weather. Learn more about how the Visibility Index Score is calculated.

Near the end of this analysis, you’ll find tables highlighting all the visibility winners. But for now, let’s delve into a couple of winning examples! What can you take from these success stories and integrate into your own AI-driven search strategy?

All IndexWatch 2025 reports

Winners

🇮🇹 – https://www.sistrix.it/blog/indexwatch-winner-2025/

🇪🇸 – https://www.sistrix.es/blog/indexwatch-ganadores-seo-2025/

🇩🇪 – https://www.sistrix.de/news/indexwatch-2025-die-seo-gewinner-des-jahres/

🇫🇷 – [Coming soon]

Losers

The losers analysis will be published on 28th Jan 2026