If Share of Search is a proxy for national attention, South Africa is a nation that is obsessed with betting, banking, and broadband.
Hollywoodbets tops the national search rankings in the 2025 Share of Search South Africa Report, a landmark study conducted by marketing effectiveness firm, Fofum. Led by founder Philip Cohen, the report delivers the country’s first in-depth audit of branded search behaviour, analysing the trajectories of 50 major brands across 13 categories over the past nine years.
Rankings aside, the longitudinal Share of Search study clearly shows that a brand’s proportion of category Google searches strongly correlates with market share. “We finally have a behavioural dataset that shows brand relevance in real time,” says Cohen. “Search doesn’t lie. It reveals what’s cutting through — and what isn’t.”
Revealing active brand intent
“The appeal of Share of Search lies in its immediacy and objectivity. Unlike brand lift studies or ad recall scores, Share of Search captures active intent, not what people say that they think of a brand, but what they seek out,” he says.
The research is a deep dive into what South Africans look for when using Google search. From sports betting to banking, telecoms to retail, the report ranks the top 50 brands by organic search volume and pinpoints where attention is rising, fading, or surging unexpectedly.
“Share of Search reflects consumer behaviour rather than stated preferences and generally correlates with market share. Movements in search share usually precede market share changes,” Cohen adds.
The lead time between rising search interest and market impact varies by category. In FMCG and retail, it’s around six months. In high-consideration sectors like automotive, it can stretch beyond nine months. In banking, where trust and inertia play a role, the lag can be closer to a year, but the pattern still holds.
The big gamble
Hollywoodbets pulled in five times more searches than FNB, the country’s most searched bank. LottoStar (#7 most searched) also cracked the top ten, confirming the sheer scale of the local betting boom. In FY2023/24 alone, South Africans placed R1.1 trillion in legal bets.
Banking still holds its own, with FNB (#2 most searched), Capitec (#6 most searched), and Standard Bank (#9 most searched) maintaining a strong digital presence. DStv sits at #3 most searched for now, but Cohen says that its search interest is sliding fast. Based on current trends, the broadcast satellite service owned by MultiChoice looks set to drop out of the top ten by late 2025.
Local e-commerce holds firm
Clicks lead in the health and beauty category, climbing to #4 most searched on the back of steady share-of-search gains. Takealot holds firm at #5 most searched as South Africa’s top e-commerce player, despite pressure from global fast-fashion giants like Shein and Temu.
Checkers rounds out the top ten at #8 most searched, leading the retail supermarket category and underscoring its continued traction with middle- and upper-income shoppers.
Link between search and market share
The methodology isn’t new. Les Binet, a leading global authority on marketing effectiveness, has long championed that brands can use search behaviour as a proxy for market performance. By tracking a brand’s proportion of organic search queries over time, Binet has shown a strong link between search interest and market share. When Share of Search declines, Binet says sales typically follow.
But it’s not just a diagnostic tool. Binet’s work suggests that well-timed advertising can reverse the trend, boosting search activity in the short term and supporting long-term brand growth. In essence, he positions Share of Search as both an early warning system and a lever for recovery.
Fofum’s Share of Search report is the first to validate this at scale in South Africa, using local data, in local categories, across 50 of the most searched major brands.
The long view shows behaviour
By embracing long data, marketers can move beyond short-term metrics and gain a more profound understanding of the evolving forces shaping consumer behaviour.
“Share of Search isn’t a silver bullet,” says Cohen, “but it’s a damned good early-warning system.”
The most arresting part of the report is its longitudinal view. In banking, Capitec’s rise, from sub-5% Share of Search in 2015 to market leader in 2024, is mirrored almost exactly in its retail deposit growth. In telecoms, Telkom’s decline in brand interest begins years before its subscriber losses. And in retail, Checkers’ post-2020 surge in Share of Search aligns with its gains among higher-income shoppers.
Ignore search at your peril
The implication: marketers ignoring search data are flying blind. And worse, they may be overinvesting in decaying brand assets. “If your Share of Voice is up but your Share of Search is flat, you’re not winning, you’re shouting into the void,” says Cohen.
For media strategists, the Share of Search model flips the funnel. Rather than treating search as a performance channel trailing at the end of the customer journey, it positions it as a litmus test for upper-funnel effectiveness.
This is particularly relevant in a market like South Africa, where above-the-line spend remains heavily weighted toward traditional media. For years, brand teams clung to ATL as the fortress of equity-building, while digital remained siloed under performance. Share of Search obliterates this divide.
One metric to rule them all
By tracking changes in branded search volume week-by-week, marketers can link media activity to real-world brand impact in near real-time. It also creates a common currency across disciplines: creative, media, brand, and performance teams can all rally around a single, observable metric.
For marketers accustomed to focus groups and fuzzy recall scores, Share of Search may seem alien. But it reflects a truth too often overlooked: in 2024, brands are built, and broken, on screens.
And for brand leaders and media buyers, it comes down to this: if people aren’t searching for you, they’re not buying you.
Charles Lee Mathews is a senior editor to MarkLives MEDIA and a senior writer to MarkLives.com, as well as co-founder of The Writers, a writing consultancy.
