Black Friday 2026: the first movers start 70 days early. Here is what to watch.

Most ecommerce teams start watching competitors' Black Friday plans in November, when the ads and emails arrive. Last year, that was already late. We looked at when the brands we track first advertised Black Friday or Cyber Monday in 2025, then checked every channel again, 50 days before Black Friday 2026. The early moves are quiet, they are not discounts, and most teams never see them.

1. Last year: 70 days vs. 11 days

Of the 64 brands we track that advertised on Facebook and Instagram in November 2025, 31 ran ads that mentioned Black Friday or Cyber Monday.

The typical brand (the median) ran its first one 11 days before Black Friday, which fell on November 28, 2025. 18 of the 31 started in the final 13 days.

The first brand started 70 days before. On September 19, a big home-decor retailer ran an ad with no discount in it at all. The message was a sign-up: "be the first to hear about Black Friday." Ten weeks out, it was building the list it would sell to in November.

The second early move came on October 14. A mid-size beauty brand opened a "Cyber Monday" sale, seven weeks before Cyber Monday (December 1). Early access only, behind a password. The ads ran for about two days and were gone.

Neither move looked like Black Friday from the outside. There was no countdown, no sitewide banner, no "up to 70% off". A team that started watching in mid-November would have seen the crowd, not the brands that moved first.

The wording itself barely changed. Across the same brands' ads that season:

• 1,969 ads mentioning Black Friday
• 132 ads mentioning Cyber Monday
• 7 ads mentioning BFCM

2. Why the first moves are quiet

The early moves in our data were not price cuts. They were a sign-up ad and a password-protected early access sale. That matches what the wider market reported about the 2025 season:

• Shoppers start early. In the National Retail Federation's 2025 holiday survey, 42% of shoppers planned to begin browsing and buying before November, mostly to spread out their budget (54%) or avoid last-minute stress (41%). (NRF, Oct 16, 2025)
• Early access beat blanket discounts. Klaviyo, whose platform sent more than 22.7 billion messages over BFCM 2025, reported that discounts dropped 10% year over year while demand held, with brands leaning on "early access, exclusive drops, VIP perks, and personalized offers". (Klaviyo, Dec 2, 2025)
• The season started at the start of November. Global-e, the cross-border ecommerce platform, reported that "the shopping peak began earlier than in previous years, with promotional activity starting at the beginning of November", and that "merchants who launched promotions early saw corresponding upticks in sales from the outset". (Global-e, Dec 2, 2025)
• The weekend itself keeps growing. Shopify merchants sold a record $14.6 billion over the Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekend 2025, up 27% year over year, peaking at $5.1 million per minute on Black Friday. (Shopify, Dec 2, 2025)
• The deals pulled demand forward. Adobe Analytics measured $44.2 billion in U.S. online spending over the five days from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday 2025 (up 7.7%), and noted that "competitive and persistent deals throughout Cyber Week pushed consumers to shop earlier". (BNN Bloomberg on Adobe Analytics, Dec 2, 2025)

"Merchants that were well prepared for the early holiday shopping peak, reaped the rewards."

Put together: the customers who buy first are the ones a brand has already collected, and the tools to collect them (sign-up ads, early access, VIP lists) look nothing like a sale. That is why they are easy to miss.

3. Where Black Friday 2026 stands, 50 days out

Updated weekly: the numbers below are the October 8 check. The newest check, compared with the week before, is on the Black Friday 2026 Rival Watch.

Black Friday 2026 is on Friday, November 27, and Cyber Monday on November 30. On October 8, we checked every channel we monitor for the same three terms (Black Friday, Cyber Monday, BFCM, in any spelling).

Of those 147 live pages:

• 11 already say 2026 in the page title (5 big brands, 6 mid-size)
• 29 still show an old year (20 from 2025, one from 2021)
• 107 show no year at all

Two of the 2026 pages say more than the year. One is a sign-up page for Black Friday 2026. Another says, in effect, "coming soon: our offers for 2026".

And the home-decor retailer that went first last year? Its menu already says "Black Friday 2026". It is advertising right now, and none of its live ads mention Black Friday yet. The page is ready before the message.

4. Why the pages are already there (and why 29 are out of date)

This part is not a secret strategy. It is Google's published advice. In its Search Central guidance on Black Friday and Cyber Monday pages, Google recommends three things that match what we see:

1. Create the page early, "well before the sale so Googlebot has time to discover and index the page".
2. Link to it from your home page "to increase their prominence".
3. Use a recurring URL, for example /sale/black-friday, not /sale/2020/black-friday.

That explains the 107 pages with no year: a permanent address that lives all year, waiting to be filled. It also explains the 21 homepage links: the menu item exists before the offer does.

The 29 pages with an old year are the other side of the same advice. A permanent page only works if someone updates it. In October 2026, 20 brands still have a live page labelled 2025 in its title or address, some still advertising last year's sale as if it were running. That is what a shopper, a search engine or an AI assistant finds today if it lands there.

5. What to watch, week by week

Based on last year's timeline, this is the order in which the signals showed up. None of it requires guessing a competitor's plan; it is all public.

Now to October 31: the quiet phase

• New or renamed Black Friday and Cyber Monday pages (check the year in the page title).
• Sign-up and "be the first to know" ads, with no discount in them.
• Menu and footer links that point to a Black Friday page.

November 1 to 14: early access

• Password, VIP or members-only offers that use the Black Friday or Cyber Monday name.
• Short-lived ads (last year's earliest Cyber Monday ads ran for about two days).
• The first emails that mention the event.
• By November 14 last year, 13 of the 31 brands had started.

November 15 to 27: the crowd

• Last year, the typical brand's first Black Friday ad ran around November 17.
• Homepage banners, sitewide codes, countdowns.

6. A five-minute check for this week

7. Why we built RivalSweeper

Doing this by hand for three competitors is an afternoon. Doing it for thirty, across ads, emails, social, homepages and landing pages, every day for seven weeks, is not something a team keeps up. That is the same math behind why manual competitor monitoring breaks down.

RivalSweeper watches competitors' storefronts, prices, promotions, newsletters and ads continuously, and tells you what changed, when, and what to react to next. Competitive intelligence shouldn't only tell you what your competitor is doing today. It should tell you what changed, and when it started.

How we measured

• Brands: the ecommerce brands RivalSweeper monitors. Several domains of one brand (for example .com and .de) count once.
• Terms: Black Friday, Cyber Monday and BFCM, case-insensitive, in any spelling (blackfriday, black-friday, black_friday, cybermonday, and so on). No other event names were counted.
• Last year: Facebook and Instagram ads (Meta Ads) from brands that advertised in November 2025. A brand's start date is the delivery start of its first ad naming one of the terms, between August 1 and November 30, 2025. Ads that are no longer publicly listed are not counted, so these numbers are a floor.
• Today: everything seen between October 1 and 8, 2026: live ads, emails received, recent social posts and on-site promo messages. Google ads were not included, because their text cannot be read reliably.
• Homepages: only true homepages (pages whose own canonical address is the site's root). A match is visible text or a link on the page.
• Live pages: pages whose address contains one of the terms, opened live on October 8, 2026. A page counts only if it loads, stays on a Black Friday or Cyber Monday address, and is not an error or bot-check page. Pages that were not promotional (internal test collections, exclusion lists, a forum thread) were removed by hand, and pages that could not be reached were not counted.
• Brand size: the catalog size we track. Big = 5,000+ products, mid-size = 500 to 4,999, small = under 500.

References

• Google Search Central Blog, "Best practices for Black Friday and Cyber Monday pages", Alan Kent, October 2020: developers.google.com
• National Retail Federation, "Consumers to spend second-highest amount on record, according to NRF holiday survey", October 16, 2025: nrf.com
• Klaviyo, BFCM 2025 results press release, December 2, 2025 (SEC filing): sec.gov
• Global-e, "Global-e Sees 36% YoY Uplift in Black Friday-Cyber Monday Weekend Global E-commerce Sales", December 2, 2025: prnewswire.com
• Shopify, "Shopify Merchants Achieve Record-Breaking $14.6 Billion in Black Friday-Cyber Monday Sales", December 2, 2025 (SEC filing): sec.gov
• BNN Bloomberg, "U.S. online sales surge to US$44.2 billion during five-day holiday shopping, Adobe Analytics says", December 2, 2025: bnnbloomberg.ca
• Meta Transparency Center, public transparency tools for Meta Ads: transparency.meta.com