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The free Black Friday 2026 planning template for SEO, PPC and AI search
Black Friday 2026 falls on 27th November. This is the working file I built for my brightonSEO and MeasureFest talk, updated for 2026 so it covers AI search alongside the CRO, paid search and measurement work that decides peak.
Seven tabs, all editable. Take your own copy, delete what doesn't apply to how you trade, and work from the rest.
What's inside
Seven tabs you can work from
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Essentials checklist
27 tried and tested actions across strategy, SEO and AI search, CRO and paid search. Each one has a tick box and a category, so the list can be split across a team and worked through rather than read once.
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Timeline and key dates
September foundations through to the first week of December, with the paid search and CRO focus for each stage, and the demand data behind why that stage exists.
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Promo planner
Every offer in one place: RRP, sale price, the saving worked out for you, priority, start and end dates, and which of Shopping, Search and Performance Max each offer runs on.
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Ad creative guidance
Headline and USP templates that have carried peak campaigns, prioritised so you know what to write first and what can wait until the sale is running.
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Success metrics and conversions
Primary and secondary conversions mapped across Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising and GA4, so the signals beyond the purchase are in place before demand arrives rather than after it.
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Supplemental feed kickstarter
The column structure for a Merchant Center supplemental feed: titles, images, custom labels, descriptions, promotion IDs and availability, ready to fill and upload.
The welcome tab opens the file and points you at where to start.
New for 2026
What's changed since the talk
AI search sits in the checklist
Checking what ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews tell customers about your brand, making product and category pages answer the questions buyers ask before they commit, and keeping one evergreen Black Friday URL instead of a new one each year.
The timeline starts in September
Peak preparation used to begin a month out. The redirect maps, page speed work, Merchant Center diagnostics and the product data AI reads all need longer than that, so the timeline now opens three months ahead.
Dates and data refreshed
Everything is set for Black Friday on 27th November and Cyber Monday on the 30th, with 2025 figures from Adobe and Barclays, and a reminder to annotate GA4 for the AI Assistants channel before you compare year on year.
Who it's for
Built for teams already deep in peak planning
It suits e-commerce teams running their own Black Friday: the person holding the offers and margin, whoever owns paid search, and the marketing lead who needs one view of what's agreed. Plenty of it applies to lead generation too, since the timeline, the measurement tab and the page speed work don't care what you sell.
It won't do the thinking for you, and it isn't meant to. It's the structure I use so nothing obvious gets missed in the weeks where there's no time left to fix it.
Get the Black Friday planning template for 2026
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All yours. Make a copy and it's ready to work from.
Open the Google SheetWhere it came from
The thinking behind it
The template came out of two long-running e-commerce accounts and the talk I gave on them at brightonSEO and MeasureFest. I've written up the CRO and paid search execution in full, along with what AI search has since changed about peak.