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The Digital Fan Engagement Index

The independent standard for tracking and comparing fan volume and behaviour across the internet worldwide.

 

Introduction to the Digital Fan Index

The Digital Fan Engagement Index™ is a research framework detailing how sports teams, leagues, athletes, competitions and media outlets perform and intersect across the internet.

It measures search demand, visibility and authority as it’s core analysis and combines this with social reach, revenue and other statistics where further insight is available and relevant. In essence, the reports signal how fans search for, discover and interact with sports brands across search engines, AI-driven platforms and the open web.

Unlike traditional audience measurement techniques that focus on broadcast or platform-specific metrics, the Digital Fan Index investigates the real behaviour of modern fans: what their search intent is, how they navigate between platforms, and which organizations command genuine digital authority during an era of great change across internet browsing and discovery.

This page serves as the permanent hub for all Digital Fan Engagement Index publications and all editions (past and those conformed for the future) are listed below (see Editions).

 

Collage of fan index report pages

What the Index Measures

The Fan Engagement Index is based around three pillars of digital performance:

1. Fan Demand Across the Internet
The intent of sports fans and how often they query a team, athlete or competition in search engines, including branded vs non-branded search usage in countries across the world.

2. Digital Surfacing and Visibility
How often an organisation appears within priority search and AI-surfaced engines such as Google, ChatGPT and Perplexity, including entity-level discovery, long-tail performance and paid for placements.

3. Authority & Structure
How effectively an organisation’s content ecosystem is referenced, linked, distributed and reinforced among relevant and trusted publishers, educational institutions and partner organisations. These are signals that are increasingly important in modern day search and AI engines.

Editions

All current and future Digital Fan Engagement Index reports are published as dedicated sub-page reports and linked to from this hub.

Current listed editions:

    • MLB Player Engagement Index
    • Formula 1 Engagement Index

Each report is independently researched but structurally comparable, enabling year-on-year and cross-market analysis.

Why Fan Engagement Requires New Standards & Comparable Reference Points

Up to now, fan analytics has been based on factors that largely disregard fan intent, instead focusing on followers, impressions, ratings and reach.

While these metrics are important, they offer few signals about how fans discover and evaluate sports brands.

Crucially, in order to reach new fans and grow the popularity of sports, leagues and teams, the following is required to gain a more complete insight:

    • Search behaviour, intent and questions rather than channel loyalty

    • AI-assisted answers and conversational enquiry rather than ten blue links

    • Topic-level and cluster authority rather than individual viral posts

In response to the demands of the modern day usage of sports fans on the internet, The Digital Fan Engagement Index exists to provide a neutral, central hub with structured benchmarks to help sports industry professionals prepare for this new reality.

How the Index Is Built and the Data Sources Used

Each report combines large-scale search behaviour data, content structure analysis and authority mapping across:

    • Teams and leagues

    • Players, athletes and talent entities

    • Competitions and tournaments

    • Academic partners
    • Sports publishers

While statitistics on individual entities are useful, it is comparisons between teams, leagues and franchises in different areas of the world which help provide insight into future performance, sponsorshop and collaboration opportunities on a macro level.

All data used either in the Digital Fan Index editions and/or published on the website comes from atleast one of the following sources unless specifically mentioned within the data referenced: SEMrush, Keysearch, Google Trends, SEO PowerSuite, Ahrefs, Google Ads, Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

Who the Digital Fan Index Is For?

The Digital Fan Engagement Index is used by a range of sports media industry professionals, including:

    • Sports leagues assessing market expansion opportunities

    • Clubs and franchises evaluating digital maturity

    • Rights-holders benchmarking international visibility

    • Sponsors seeking evidence-based partnership alignment

    • Broadcasters and publishers mapping future demand

It is built for executive decision-making, with the demands of future search and internet usage at the forefront of it’s design.

Hyperset Editorial Network Participation

A select group of organisations contribute insight, commentary and distribution to specific editions of the Index through the Hyperset Editorial Network.

This curated network connects rights-holders, publishers and academic institutions to ensure that the Index is:

    • Independently informed

    • Referenced across authoritative environments

    • Embedded into the wider sports knowledge graph

Participation is by invitation and subject to qualification. Please visit the Digital Sports Network page to find out more, or contact stefan@hypersetgroup.com.

How to Use the Digital Fan Index?

The Index is not a one-off report. Rather, it is a reference framework providing an ongoing and trusted source for digital fan engagement analytics.

Mostly, it is used by sports industry professionals to:

    • Identify structural weaknesses in their digital footprint

    • Prioritise investment across content, technology and partnerships

    • Benchmark against domestic and international peers

    • Track the long-term impact of digital strategy changes

Accessing the Reports

All published editions of the Digital Fan Engagement Index are accessible from this page as they are released – please see the ‘editions’ section above.

Each edition is designed to be read as a standalone analysis while also contributing to the wider dataset maintained here.