Traffic Trends for US Beauty Stores
Traffic Recovery Masks a Deeper Year-Over-Year Shift
US beauty e-commerce stores averaged 7,261.1 monthly visitors in January 2026, representing a notable recovery from the segment's trough of 4,879.9 visits in March 2025. However, when placed against the trajectory from 2024, the picture is more complex. Traffic peaked at 9,632.7 average monthly visits in November 2024 before declining sharply into early 2025—a drop of roughly -43.1% from peak to trough over just four months. The January 2026 figure sits -24.6% below that November 2024 peak, suggesting the segment has not yet recaptured the momentum it held during the autumn 2024 surge.
The year-over-year comparison between January 2025 (5,490.1) and January 2026 (7,261.1) tells a more encouraging story, however—a recovery of +32.3% on a like-for-like monthly basis. This rebound indicates that while 2025 opened with pronounced weakness, the latter half of the year staged a meaningful reversal, with traffic climbing steadily from July 2025 onward through December 2025 (7,314.6) before holding relatively stable into the new year.
Organic Search Dominates the Channel Mix
As of January 2026, SEO traffic accounts for 88.3% of all visits to US beauty e-commerce stores, representing 16.6 million sessions out of a total 18.8 million. This heavy organic concentration is reinforced by a +29.6% year-over-year growth rate in organic search traffic—a strong signal that these stores are benefiting from compounding content and SEO investment rather than paid acquisition.
Organic social contributes a meaningful secondary channel at 10.0% of total traffic (1.9 million sessions), reflecting the inherently visual and community-driven nature of the beauty category, where platforms such as Instagram and TikTok continue to drive discovery. Paid search, by contrast, accounts for just 0.5% of traffic (101,491 sessions), and paid social for 1.1% (202,614 sessions). The combined paid share of just 1.6% suggests that US beauty stores in this segment are either deliberately under-investing in paid acquisition or have found organic and social channels sufficiently productive to reduce reliance on paid media.
Revenue Growth Outpaces Traffic Recovery
Despite traffic remaining well below its 2024 highs, average revenue per store in January 2026 reached $79,745.89—a +63.8% increase versus January 2025's $48,689.61 and a +76.6% increase versus January 2024's $45,155.02. This divergence between traffic volume and revenue performance points to meaningful improvements in conversion efficiency, average order value, or customer quality over the period.
The seasonal revenue pattern mirrors the traffic curve, with Q4 representing the strongest period in both years. November 2024 peaked at $102,322.0 in average revenue, while November 2025 reached $79,789.4—down -22.0% year-over-year for that month specifically, but still 69.4% above January 2024 levels. The Q4 2025 performance, combined with a sustained $79,745.9 into January 2026, suggests the segment has shifted toward a higher revenue baseline even in traditionally softer months. The ability to generate more revenue from fewer visitors is a defining characteristic of this segment's current operating environment.
SEO Performance for US Beauty Stores
Organic Traffic Trends: Growth Amid Structural Softness
US beauty e-commerce stores recorded average SEO traffic of 6,415 visitors in January 2026, representing a +29.6% year-over-year increase in organic search traffic. However, this headline figure requires important context. The segment experienced a pronounced trough throughout 2025, with average SEO traffic dropping as low as 4,714 in April 2025—a significant retreat from the late-2024 peak of 9,277 in November 2024. The recovery through Q4 2025 and into January 2026 is encouraging, with December 2025 reaching 6,089 and January 2026 climbing further to 6,415, but these levels still trail the segment's prior highs by roughly 30%.
SEO traffic consistently dominates total traffic across the segment. In January 2026, organic search accounted for approximately 88.4% of all traffic (6,415 out of 7,261 total visits), a ratio that has remained stable throughout the observation period, underscoring how heavily US beauty stores depend on unpaid search as their primary acquisition channel.
Traffic Distribution: A Heavily Long-Tail Landscape
The traffic distribution within the segment reveals stark concentration at the lower end of the scale. Of the stores analyzed, 2,583 fall in the under-50k monthly SEO traffic tier, while only 2 stores operate in the 100k–250k range and just 1 store exceeds 250k monthly visits from organic search. This extreme skew indicates that the overwhelming majority of US beauty e-commerce stores are operating with modest organic footprints, with only a handful of outliers achieving meaningful scale. For most stores in this segment, SEO traffic optimization represents both the largest opportunity and the most critical vulnerability in their acquisition mix.
Organic SERP visibility has not kept pace with traffic growth, declining -1.0% year-over-year. This divergence between traffic growth (+29.6%) and SERP count (-1.0%) suggests that existing rankings are delivering more clicks per position—potentially reflecting improved featured snippet capture, stronger brand searches, or SERP layout changes—rather than genuine expansion in keyword coverage.
Domain Authority and Backlink Profile: Declining Strength
Domain authority metrics point to an erosion in underlying SEO strength. The average PageRank for January 2026 stands at 2.59, reflecting a -9.1% year-over-year decline. The PageRank trajectory over the tracked period shows a meaningful drop from a high of approximately 3.54 in late 2024 to 2.59 in January 2026, a level that places most stores in this segment in a relatively low-authority band and limits their competitiveness for high-volume transactional keywords.
Backlink and referring domain trends mirror this softening. Average referring domains in January 2026 sit at approximately 690.7, down from peaks of roughly 3,891.8 in October 2024—though that figure likely reflects a small number of high-backlink outliers distorting the average. More recent months show stabilization in the 675–750 referring domain range, with average backlinks around 9,987 in January 2026. The gradual compression in both metrics since mid-2025 suggests that link acquisition efforts have not kept pace with natural link churn, placing incremental pressure on the domain authority scores already showing year-over-year decline. For stores seeking to sustain the traffic recovery evident in early 2026, rebuilding referring domain counts will be a critical lever.
Paid Media Trends for US Beauty Stores
Paid Search Spend and Adoption Remain Selective
As of January 2026, the average paid search spend among US beauty e-commerce stores sits at $452.41, recovering modestly from a November 2025 trough of $379.20 but still well below the mid-year peak of $608.89 recorded in July 2025. Only 15.2% of stores in the segment were active on Google Ads in the most recent month, with 18.7% having run campaigns at any point in the current year. This relatively low adoption rate suggests that paid search remains a tool used by a minority of players in the space, even as those who do invest spend at above-average levels. The segment's current Google Ads spend of $304.50 sits 25.3% above the global average of $242.95, indicating that active advertisers in US beauty are more committed spenders than their cross-industry peers.
Spend patterns across 2025 reveal clear seasonal dynamics: a notable dip in June ($356.91) was followed by a strong rebound in July ($608.89), likely tied to summer promotional cycles, before spend declined again heading into the holiday period. Counterintuitively, November and December 2025 recorded some of the lowest average spends of the year at $379.20 and $373.87 respectively, suggesting many stores in this segment do not lean heavily on paid search during the peak retail season.
Paid Traffic Share Has Contracted Sharply Year-Over-Year
Paid search traffic has declined dramatically on a year-over-year basis, with the segment posting -69.2% YoY growth in paid visits as of January 2026. In January 2026, average paid search traffic stood at just 256.29 visits per store, representing 3.0% of total traffic — compared to 365.68 visits and a 4.8% share in January 2025. Looking further back, the segment reached a high-water mark in April and May 2024, when paid search accounted for 14.6% and 13.9% of total traffic respectively, with average paid visits exceeding 1,296 and 1,316 per store. The compression from those levels to the current 3.0% share illustrates a fundamental pullback in reliance on paid search as a traffic driver. Paid costs declined at a nearly equivalent rate (-68.6% YoY), suggesting this contraction reflects reduced campaign activity rather than efficiency losses.
Total Paid Media Investment Outpaces Global Benchmarks Significantly
Despite the decline in paid search traffic, US beauty stores that do invest in paid media are doing so at scale well above global norms. Total paid media spend for the segment averages $2,192.06 per store, which is 136.2% above the global average of $928.11. Meta Ads, in particular, stands out: the segment's average spend of $3,636.74 is 26.9% above the global average of $2,866.26, even though only 3.0% of stores ran Meta campaigns in the most recent month. This pattern — low adoption but high per-store spend — points to a bifurcated landscape in which a small subset of US beauty stores are running aggressive, well-funded paid media programs while the majority rely on organic or owned channels. The concentration of spend among active advertisers helps explain why segment averages remain elevated even as overall participation rates stay modest.
Organic Social for US Beauty Stores
Instagram's Shrinking Share of Traffic
Instagram's contribution to total site traffic among US beauty e-commerce stores has declined notably heading into January 2026. After peaking at 13.0% of total traffic in May 2025 (averaging 1,008.56 visits), Instagram's share dropped to 9.4% in January 2026, representing an average of just 745.64 visits per store. That marks a -3.6 percentage point contraction from the May high and sits below the mid-year average of roughly 12.3–12.6% sustained across the summer months. The pullback in posting cadence likely contributes to this trend: stores averaged 3.32 posts per week in December 2025, falling to 2.93 posts per week in January 2026, a decline of 0.39 posts per week month-over-month. With an average engagement rate of just 0.02% across the segment, the challenge is not merely frequency but content resonance. The follower base is heavily concentrated at the lower end of the scale—720 stores have under 10k followers and 703 stores sit in the 10k–50k range—meaning organic reach limitations are structural for the majority of players in this segment.
TikTok Stabilizes After a Volatile Year
TikTok's traffic share has stabilized in the 5–7% range after a turbulent opening to 2025. In January 2025, TikTok contributed just 0.2% of total traffic (averaging only 22.56 visits), likely reflecting platform uncertainty in the US market at that time. By February 2025, that figure surged to 7.4% (456.48 average visits), and the channel continued to grow through mid-year, peaking at 6.6% of total traffic in July 2025 with an average of 682.25 visits per store. Since that peak, TikTok's share has gradually compressed, landing at 5.1% in January 2026 with an average of 385.39 visits. Posting frequency mirrored this softening: weekly uploads fell from 2.83 per week in December 2025 to 1.90 per week in January 2026, a drop of 0.93 uploads per week. Despite the January dip, TikTok's full-year trajectory represents a meaningful and durable traffic source that did not exist at scale for this segment at the start of 2025, establishing it as a channel worth sustained investment.
Organic Social Emerges as a Meaningful Traffic Driver
Organic social traffic—distinct from platform-specific referral channels—underwent a dramatic transformation across 2025. In January 2025, organic social traffic was effectively negligible at 0.08 average visits per store (0.0% of total traffic). By May 2025, it had surged to 11.1% of total traffic, averaging 604.36 visits per store. After a dip in June (3.1%), the channel recovered and has held firmly in the 10–12% range from August 2025 onward. In January 2026, organic social accounted for 10.0% of total traffic, averaging 728.56 visits—consistent with December 2025's 10.0% share. This stabilization is a positive signal: organic social appears to have graduated from a volatile, experimental channel to a structurally embedded traffic source for US beauty stores. With stores currently averaging 3.70 posts per week across platforms and the segment skewing toward smaller follower tiers, maintaining this ~10% share will require consistent content output and audience development, particularly for the 720 stores operating below 10k followers where algorithmic reach is most constrained.
Website Performance for US Beauty Stores
Lighthouse Performance Signals a Technical Challenge
US beauty e-commerce stores recorded an average Lighthouse Performance score of 50.6/100 in January 2026, reflecting a -1.0% decline from the previous month's score of 50.7/100. This places the segment in a technically vulnerable position, as scores below 50 are generally classified as "poor" by Google's own benchmarks, and the segment is hovering dangerously close to that threshold. Page speed and core web vitals are increasingly tied to both organic search rankings and paid media quality scores, meaning underperformance here carries compounding commercial risk.
Accessibility held relatively steady, with the current month score of 86.9/100 edging up marginally from 86.8/100 the prior month — a negligible but directionally positive shift. For beauty brands where product imagery, color contrast, and interactive elements are central to the browsing experience, maintaining strong accessibility scores is both a compliance and conversion consideration.
SEO Scores Remain a Relative Strength
The average Lighthouse SEO score for US beauty stores stood at 91.2/100 in January 2026, a figure that reflects consistent on-page SEO hygiene across the segment. While this represents 0% change versus the prior month on a rounded basis, the underlying data shows a slight pull from 91.1/100 to 90.8/100 — a marginal softening worth monitoring as competition for organic beauty traffic intensifies heading into spring.
The strength of these SEO scores suggests that the segment prioritizes metadata, crawlability, and structured markup. However, high SEO scores do not offset the performance penalty: Google's ranking systems increasingly weight page experience signals, meaning stores with strong SEO fundamentals but lagging performance scores may find diminishing organic returns over time.
Catalog Size and Pricing Dynamics Reflect a Fragmented Market
The SKU distribution across US beauty stores reveals a heavily skewed market structure. The vast majority of stores — 1,707 — operate with catalogs of 250 SKUs or fewer, while only 42 stores carry more than 2,500 products. This long tail suggests that the segment is dominated by boutique and specialist operators rather than large multi-brand retailers, which likely influences both the average price point and the technical investment capacity available to these businesses.
Average product pricing tells an interesting story over the trailing six months. After sitting at $150.29 in August 2025, prices dipped to $132.20 in September before partially recovering. December 2025 saw a return to $150.15 — consistent with holiday gifting dynamics pushing premium SKUs to the front of catalogs — before pulling back again to $134.77 in January 2026 as post-holiday clearance and value-oriented browsing typically dominates. The February 2026 figure of $260.95 represents a striking outlier, more than +93.6% above the January level, which may reflect early data skew, a luxury product promotional cycle, or a shift in the mix of reporting stores rather than a true market-wide repricing event. This figure warrants close observation as February data matures.
Taken together, the combination of modest catalog sizes, cyclical pricing patterns, and underperforming Lighthouse scores paints a picture of a segment with genuine SEO discipline but meaningful technical debt — particularly around site speed — that could limit the conversion impact of otherwise well-structured storefronts.