The question
Put yourself in the seat of a CMO in the gift business. Three questions decide your strategy: who do I actually compete with, how big is the demand, and where can I win? Traditional research takes weeks and a budget. Search data answers all three in about two hours — because the market has already been organised for you, by Google and by Amazon, around what real people search and buy.
This is that worked example. Start with four websites and two words. End with the whole market.
Output 1 — the competitive set: who you really compete with
Seed: four gift sites (Not On The High Street, Moonpig, Red Letter Days, Buyagift) and a couple of seed terms ("gift", "personalised gift"). From there Theia surfaced 100+ gift websites and ranked the 40 most relevant — the true competitive set, by how much of the same demand each one actually contests.
The surprise was who wasn't there. Amazon doesn't make the top 100. Not because it can't rank for "gift" — but because gift isn't core to Amazon the way it is to findmeagift, Menkind or Virgin Experience Days. On gift search, the specialists own the shelf. Etsy and John Lewis appear, further down — a signal of how seriously each treats the category.
How a CMO uses it. Stop benchmarking against the competitors you assume, and start with the ones who actually contest your demand. Spot where a giant is absent — that's white space. → Competitors & market share
Output 2 — the market map: there isn't one gift market, there are four
Group those sites the way Google groups the searches behind them, and the market falls into four distinct markets — different businesses that happen to share the word "gift":
| Market | Who leads it |
|---|---|
| Personalised gifts | Not On The High Street |
| Experiences — spa days, weekend breaks | Red Letter Days, Buyagift, Virgin Experience Days |
| Cards | Moonpig, Card Factory |
| Generic physical gifts | Menkind, IWOOT, Oliver Bonas |
This matters because share of voice only means something inside a market. Comparing John Lewis to Not On The High Street across the whole space is noise; within "personalised gifts" it's a real fight.
How a CMO uses it. Decide which market you're in, whether you can credibly extend into an adjacent one, and where the open ground is. → The market map
Output 3 — the demand language: the words the market actually uses
Take the 40 competitors, their top 1,000 search terms each — 23,785 unique terms — and score and refine them down to a core vocabulary of 9,015 terms. This is the language the market genuinely shops in, granular and unguessable: "gift for hard to buy for female" is a real, high-intent query no brainstorm produces.
How a CMO uses it. This is the content and SEO roadmap, handed to you — the exact phrases to answer on your pages and in your campaigns. → The demand language
Output 4 — the size and the mindset of demand
The same data sizes the prize. 14 million generic gift searches in June alone — and around four in five searches are generic, not brand ("gift for her", "spa break", not "Moonpig"). Search drives roughly 60% of a leading gift site's traffic.
That generic-heavy split is the whole strategy in one number: at the moment of buying a gift, most people don't have a brand in mind. Whoever is most relevant to "gift for hard to buy for female" wins the sale — and that relevance wins twice: it ranks you on Google, and it converts the shopper who lands.
How a CMO uses it. Size the opportunity for the board, justify investing in generic content over pure brand bidding, and read the buyer's mindset at the point of decision. → Market sizing · Visibility — SEO & GEO
Output 5 — the same market, on Amazon
Everything so far is the Google gift market — and it's mostly experiences, personalisation and cards, owned by specialists. Ask the same question on Amazon and you get a different market entirely. On the Amazon shelf, "gift" resolves to physical products — gadgets, novelty, tech, personalised keepsakes — the things people actually click buy on. Experiences and cards barely register; the brands that win are the ones whose products are prominent when someone shops the gift shelf.
Same word, two markets. A brand that reads only one is half-blind: you can own "personalised gifts" on Google and be invisible on the Amazon gift shelf where the impulse purchase happens — or the reverse. This is why Theia maps both Google and Amazon (and YouTube, and the retailer pages): your customers shop the whole digital shelf, so the picture has to.
How a CMO uses it. Know which surface your category's gifting actually lives on, and which gifts are prominent on each — then stop optimising for one while the sales happen on the other. → Competitors & market share
Why it matters
"Search data is not only interesting from a tactical standpoint — it should inform every CMO strategy."
The ingredients are public. Anyone can buy the flour, butter and eggs — the keyword tools, the rank trackers. The edge is the recipe: turning all of it into the four markets, the real competitive set, the core vocabulary and the sized opportunity — fast enough to act on, and clear enough to take to a board.
That is what Theia bakes. See everything a study produces →.
This worked example used the public UK gift market. The same engine runs on your category and your country in four weeks — and now adds perception, sentiment and ready-to-publish content on top.