NCAA’s Women’s Basketball Stars Eclipsing Men’s Ahead of March Madness

Searches for Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, and others triumph over those for Zach Edey, Dalton Knecht, and Bronny James.

Keyword analysis of trends over time reveals that NCAA fans in the US are actively searching for women’s college basketball stars over men’s.

Similarweb analyzed keyword lists, including related search terms for the NCAA Top Female Players (Caitlin Clark, Iowa; Angel Reese, LSU; Cameron Brink, Stanford; Paige Bueckers; UCONN; and Juju Watkins, USC) and compared them to related search terms for NCAA Top Male Players (Zach Edey, Purdue; Dalton Knecht, Tennessee; Kyle Filipowski, Duke; Armando Bacot, UNC; and Bronny James, USC).

Our analysis found that the average monthly search volume for female players was higher than for male players at 1.5 million vs. 1.4 million.

In February 2024, as interest in March Madness grew and fans were interested to see how their favorite players would fare, search volume for the top women’s players grew a whopping 107% to 4.1M, compared to only 9% for the men’s keyword list.

Women’s NCAA jerseys are generating clicks and sales

Fans are looking to purchase the jerseys of their favorite NCAA players. When analyzing keyword lists for the players’ jerseys mentioned above, Similarweb found that monthly search visits for the women’s jerseys almost doubled that of the men’s.

While search volume was slightly higher for the men’s keyword list, people are more frequently clicking on the search results for the women’s jerseys, meaning they are more likely to purchase those – monthly search visits for the women’s jerseys almost doubled that of the men’s – 20.7K vs. 11.9K.

Caitlin Clark jerseys are by far the most popular of any of the players mentioned. In February 2024, traffic related to Caitlin Clark jersey going to dicksportinggoods.com jumped over 800%. Other popular websites where fans can buy her jersey include thejerseylocker.com (+471.9%) and scheels.com (+137.7%).

The Similarweb Insights & Communications team is available to pull additional or updated data on request for the news media (journalists are invited to write to press@similarweb.com). When citing our data, please reference Similarweb as the source and link back to the most relevant blog post or similarweb.com/blog/insights/.

Methodology

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by Molly Winik

Senior Content Marketing Manager

Molly has 8+ years of experience in marketing, content creation, and PR. Her work has been featured on Mention, The Times of Israel, and Culture Trip.