Who ranks when a UK client searches for a salon (2026)

When a UK client searches for a hairdresser, roughly a third of the organic results belong to somebody who is not a salon. This page counts exactly who. Ten searches, 78 organic results, every row classified by who owns the page, read on 20 September 2026 and shown row by row so you can check the count.

What the page is made of

• 50 of the 78 organic results, 64%, were a salon’s own website. Derived: 50 ÷ 78 = 0.641. Counted from Ahrefs SERP data for Great Britain, read 20 September 2026.
• 28 of the 78, 36%, were not. Derived: 28 ÷ 78 = 0.359. Same source, Ahrefs SERP data, 20 September 2026.
• A booking marketplace appeared in all ten result sets. Treatwell in 10 of 10, Booksy in 2, Fresha in 1. Three of the ten sets carried two different marketplaces.
• An Instagram profile appeared in 7 of the 10 sets, including all five of the colour searches, per Ahrefs SERP data, 20 September 2026.
• A Reddit thread appeared in 3 of the 10 sets, one of them an r/manchester thread asking for a recommendation.
• No result set returned anything at position 1. What sits above the first organic row is not measured here. See what this does not measure.

The ten keywords, row by row

Two service terms across five cities. Counts are of the organic rows the tool returned for each keyword, which was seven or eight out of a possible ten.

Keyword (Great Britain)	Rows	Salon’s own site	Marketplace	Instagram	Magazine or guide	Reddit	Not identified
hairdressers london	8	6	1	0	1	0	0
hairdressers manchester	8	5	1	1	1	0	0
hairdressers birmingham	8	6	1	0	0	1	0
hairdressers leeds	8	5	2	0	1	0	0
hairdressers glasgow	8	6	1	1	0	0	0
balayage london	7	4	1	1	1	0	0
balayage manchester	8	5	1	1	0	1	0
balayage birmingham	8	6	1	1	0	0	0
balayage leeds	7	4	2	1	0	0	0
balayage glasgow	8	3	2	1	0	1	1
All ten, Ahrefs SERP data, 20 September 2026	78	50	13	7	4	3	1

The pages that were not salons

Named, because a count nobody can check is not worth citing.

• Treatwell held a place in every one of the ten sets, for example its London hairdressers listing at position 4 for hairdressers london on 20 September 2026. For two keywords, Birmingham and Glasgow, the tool returned the same generic Treatwell places URL under a city-specific title, which is recorded here rather than tidied away.
• Booksy appeared twice, both in Leeds: hair salons in Leeds at position 9, and balayage in Leeds at position 8.
• Fresha appeared once, its home page at position 4 for balayage glasgow.
• Four magazine or city guide articles: Conde Nast Traveller on the best hair salons in London at position 5, Grazia on balayage in London at 6, Confidential Guides on Manchester at 9 and Leeds-List on Leeds at 10.
• Seven Instagram profiles, all of them a salon or a stylist rather than a brand. The pattern is worth naming: in the colour searches, a stylist’s Instagram profile ranked where her own website did not appear at all, per Ahrefs SERP data, 20 September 2026.
• Three Reddit threads, in r/brum, r/manchester and r/glasgow. Two of the three were served as a google.com redirect rather than a reddit.com URL.
• One row could not be identified. Position 9 for balayage glasgow was a google.com redirect titled “Where is best for a balayage in Glasgow?” with no destination readable in the URL, so it is counted as unidentified rather than guessed at.

Three of the ten sets also carried a salon’s own listicle: Trevor Sorbie’s best hairdressers in London at position 7, for instance, is a salon ranking on a page about other salons. Those rows are counted as a salon’s own website, because that is what they are.

What it takes to be the salon that ranks

Take the five “hairdressers [city]” searches on their own, because that is where salons rank with their home page rather than with a service page. Twenty-one independent salon home pages appear across those five sets, once four chain branch pages and three salon pages that were not home pages are set aside.

• Their median Domain Rating was 19, and the range was 0 to 38. Derived: the 21 ratings sorted, the 11th value taken, from Ahrefs SERP data, 20 September 2026. Domain Rating is Ahrefs’ own 0 to 100 estimate of a site’s link strength.
• The marketplace, social and press pages sitting beside them ran from 19 to 100: Confidential Guides 19, Leeds-List 48, Treatwell 81, Conde Nast Traveller 82, Booksy 91 and Instagram 100.
• Their median referring domain count was 435, and the range was 48 to 759. Derived the same way: 21 values sorted, the 11th taken, from Ahrefs SERP data, 20 September 2026.

Two things follow, and the second is a warning about the first. Authority is not the price of entry: three salon home pages ranked at Domain Rating 0, and the strongest independent salon in the sample sat at 38 while the Treatwell page above it sat at 81. And a referring domain total is only a total. When this studio measured a trade body’s flagship statistics page on 23 August 2026, it showed 119 referring domains of which about five were real and the rest were one spam network. Several of the salon sites here carry four hundred or more referring domains on a Domain Rating of 0 to 3, which is the profile of a link total that is mostly noise. Read 435 as a count of domains, not as a count of people who chose to cite her.

What this does not measure

• The map pack. Not measured, at all. For most local salon searches the three businesses in the map sit above everything counted here, and nothing on this page tells you anything about them.
• Ads. Stripped out before we saw the results.
• AI overviews, sitelinks and people also ask. Also stripped, which is why no set returned a position 1 and why several sets are missing a position in the middle.
• One day, one country, ten keywords. Search results move, they are personalised, and they change with the searcher’s location. This is a sample of two service terms in five cities on one date, not a national picture.
• Who gets the booking. Ranking is not being chosen, and none of this counts clicks or clients.

Method

The grid was fixed before anything was read: two service terms, “hairdressers” and “balayage”, each paired with London, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and Glasgow, giving ten keywords. Each was read once with Ahrefs SERP data for Great Britain on 20 September 2026, top ten positions requested, organic rows only. Every keyword returned rows, so nothing was dropped for want of data. The tool returned seven or eight rows per keyword rather than ten, because ads, the map pack and AI overviews are stripped before the rows reach us.

Each row was then classified by who owns the page, using the URL and the page title:

• a salon’s own website, including chain branch pages and a salon’s own service or listicle page
• a booking marketplace: Treatwell, Booksy or Fresha
• an Instagram profile
• a magazine or city guide article
• a Reddit thread
• not identified, where Google served its own redirect URL and the destination was not readable

One domain, routedcreativestudio.com, was checked against outside listings before being classified, and is a hair studio on Call Lane in Leeds. The two Google redirect rows whose titles name a subreddit were counted as Reddit; the one whose destination could not be read was left unidentified. For the Domain Rating comparison the redirect rows are excluded entirely, because the rating reported against a google.com URL belongs to google.com and not to the page it leads to.

Every percentage and median on this page is derived from those counts, and the arithmetic sits beside each one. Nothing here is estimated, modelled or carried over from another source. The counts are ours, made with a paid tool on a stated date, and we will re-read the same ten keywords and re-date this page rather than leave it standing. Once this studio has enough of its own account data to say what these results cost a salon in practice, that measured data will replace anything derived here.

Where this sits

This page is part of UK Salon Marketing Statistics, where the figures this studio maintains are collected.

Two neighbours, deliberately kept separate so that no figure is published twice. What a marketplace charges a salon for the new client it sends, with the date each fee was read, is on what it costs a UK salon to get a new client. What a click costs on Facebook and Instagram against search is on what Facebook and Instagram ads cost a UK salon.

Corrections and additions are welcome, and this page carries the date it was last read at the top.