May 2026

The same untagged Brevo send that's shown up in January and March is back: 3,491 of this month's 3,545 Referral sessions came through the same link-tracking domain, landing almost entirely on Ben Perry's and Anaïs & Dax's artist pages with 5% engagement and single-digit-second visits. That's why sessions and users both look like huge jumps against a quiet April — it's the spike returning, not a genuine step-change in audience size. Engagement rate falling to 12.4% is the clearest tell. Contact page activity, which isn't touched by the spike, grew modestly on last month.

98% of this month's Referral sessions are the same untagged Brevo domain flagged in January and March — this is now the third time in five months, and each time it lands on different artist pages depending on which links the send happened to include. Desktop share jumping back up to 97.5% (from April's 88%) tracks with it exactly, since this is desktop mail-client behaviour, not a real shift in how people browse the site.

Core pages held their usual healthy engagement, but this month the low-engagement pattern also spread into the news archive — unusual, since previous spikes stayed confined to artist pages. A cluster of old campaign write-ups (Land of Tswana, New Release for Lidl, and others) each picked up 6–7 sessions at 0% engagement this month, suggesting this send's links touched a broader mix of pages than January's or March's did.

Clicks and impressions are both down on April and down more sharply on last May, with average position also easing back slightly month on month. Branded search now makes up the majority of clicks (60.8%), a reversal from every earlier month this year where non-branded led — worth watching whether that's a genuine shift or just this month's smaller sample size moving the split around.

Ben Perry and Anaïs & Dax are this month's spike targets, in the same way Alixe Lay was in January and Alexander Massek was in March. Ben Perry's year-on-year comparison (941 vs 683) still looks like growth on paper, but both numbers include their own version of inflated traffic, so it's not a clean comparison. Kell Mitchell and Junior are the two artists showing a steadier pattern across months without an obvious spike distorting them either way.

Contact sessions grew slightly on April but engagement rate and time on page both fell, which points to this month's Referral spike touching Contact page traffic a little too, even though the volume increase here is small. This section reports page-level interest, not confirmed enquiries, since there's no button-level "contact clicked" event on the site yet.

The Journey of Two Female Entrepreneurs keeps its lead on the all-time leaderboard, though it only picked up 3 sessions this month — a quiet month for it after showing up in Search Console's top pages every month so far. Four new articles went out in May, the most active month for content this year, but none has built meaningful traffic yet since publish; worth checking again in June once they've had more time.

Both partner sites held roughly steady on last month, entirely homepage-driven as usual. Neither shows any sign of being affected by this month's Referral spike.

Art Buying's zero-session run now extends across every month compared so far this year. This has been flagged consistently enough that it's worth treating as a confirmed action item rather than a recurring note.