Temu Out-Mentions eBay and Walmart Online With 69.7 Million Web Mentions

A shopper searching for a cheap phone case, a new sofa or a birthday gift runs into retail brand names everywhere: in deal roundups, product reviews, comparison guides, TikTok recaps written up by blogs, and news stories about trade, shipping and prices. Every one of those pages shapes how the brand is seen before anyone visits its site.

For retail marketers, the question is not only how much of that coverage a brand gets, but how it sounds. A brand can dominate the conversation and still find a large share of it critical, so volume and tone need to be read side by side.

By volume, the newcomer leads. Temu is named on 69.7 million web pages, ahead of eBay's 63.2 million and more than twice Walmart's 26.7 million. Across 30 retail brands, 29.4% of recent mentions are negative and 38.8% positive, but on news pages the negative share rises to 39.6%.

On September 23, 2026 we collected the 1,000 most recent online mentions of each of 30 well-known retail brands, 29,997 mentions in all, from news sites, blogs, online stores and other pages. Each mention is scored automatically by a sentiment model for positive, negative and neutral tone, based on the text around the brand name, and web mentions count every page that contains the exact brand name. We also counted every web page that mentions each brand to measure its total coverage.

A mention is positive or negative when that score is the highest of the three, and strongly negative when its negative score is above 0.5 on a scale of 0 to 1. Share of coverage is a brand's web mentions divided by the combined mentions of the 26 brands ranked; brands whose names are everyday words, such as Target, Gap and Amazon, are not ranked by coverage. The eight industries compared across this series are retail, banks, airlines, telecom, insurance, streaming, fast food and hotels.

Temu is mentioned on 69.7 million web pages, 24% of the total for the 26 retail brands ranked, just ahead of eBay at 63.2 million (22%). Walmart (26.7 million), IKEA (21.5 million) and Etsy (20.4 million) follow.

Marketplaces lead because other sites link and refer to their listings constantly: deal blogs, product roundups and price comparisons all point at individual items. Temu's position ahead of long-established retailers shows how fast a new marketplace can take over the conversation.

29.4% of recent retail brand mentions are negative, 38.8% positive, and 19.4% strongly negative. That puts retail in the middle of the eight industries: milder than banks, airlines, telecom and insurance, harsher than streaming, fast food and hotels.

Retail tone comes from two very different sources. Product listings, gift guides and deal posts talk about stores in upbeat terms, while delivery problems, returns, price rises and store closures generate complaints. The balance between those two streams decides a retailer's overall tone.

News pages carry 35.5% of all retail mentions, and 39.6% of those mentions are negative, against 23.8% on blogs, stores and other page types.

The gap between news and everything else is the second-widest of the eight industries, after airlines. Retail news covers tariffs, layoffs, closures, recalls and data breaches, while shopping pages mostly sell. For a retailer, the news stream is where the tone problem lives.

Bed Bath & Beyond has the least negative coverage of the 30 retail brands, with 12.9% of recent mentions scored negative. IKEA (13.9%), Wayfair (15.7%), Sephora (16%) and eBay (16.2%) complete the five mildest. Scores are automated and cover each brand's 1,000 most recent mentions.

Home and beauty brands dominate the mild end, where coverage is mostly product ideas and room or beauty inspiration. At the other end, the five most negatively covered retail brands each have 42.8% or more of their recent mentions scored negative, and three are above 55%. eBay stands out as both the second most-covered brand and one of the five mildest.

High coverage and positive coverage are different measures, so track both. A brand can lead on volume while a large share of its mentions are critical, and a smaller brand can win on tone. Report share of voice and share of negative mentions together every month.

Split the news from the rest. With 39.6% of retail news mentions negative, against 23.8% elsewhere, a retailer needs a steady supply of positive news, such as local store openings, community programs, useful consumer data and product stories, to balance coverage of prices, closures and delivery problems.

Use the mild end as a model: product inspiration, gift guides and how-to content keep tone positive at scale. Our media monitoring service tracks retail brand mentions, share of voice and tone against the competitors you name.

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