The excitement of the 2025 NFL free agency season kicked off early with the start of the Legal Tampering period on Monday, March 10, at noon ET. During this window, unrestricted free agents were permitted to begin negotiating contracts ahead of the official League Year start.

While no deals are finalized until contracts are signed beginning at 4 p.m. ET Wednesday, March 12, a flurry of breaking news swept the internet as surprising trades and major roster moves dominated headlines. Fans celebrated some moves while others left them reeling, setting the stage for a dramatic few days in the football world.

As teams scrambled behind the scenes to make key deals, newsrooms across the country kept their ears to the ground, racing to break the latest trade or release announcement. Even before free agency officially begins, some publishers have already surged ahead in search visibility.

We analyzed the top five publishers’ visibility scores and rankings from March 9-11 for the US mobile News Boxes to see who’s leading the coverage. Interestingly, while this period is officially called Legal Tampering, the term itself wasn’t widely recognized or trending on Monday.

Top Keywords:
‘nfl free agency’, ‘2025 nfl free agency’, ‘free agency’, ‘nfl free agency tracker’

By the Numbers:

Ranking numbers are the individual keyword rankings an active keyword ranked for when crawled every 15-minutes.

Visibility Leaders

By the end of Tuesday, ESPN held a slight lead over Yahoo Sports in visibility score and rankings. ESPN’s advantage was largely driven by its comprehensive live updates, which accounted for 92.5% of its total visibility. Their coverage, titled “Tracking NFL Free Agency: Live Updates on Every Signing, Trade, Cut, and Rumor,” solidified ESPN’s reputation as a go-to source for breaking sports news.

Yahoo Sports secured second place in visibility. For the 16 articles that ranked for the targeted keywords, 9 had the same beginning headline, “NFL Free Agency: Offseason Updates.” This keyword-focused approach may prove to be a winning strategy as the days unfold. 

In third place was CBS Sports, which achieved a strong presence in search rankings with their 2025 NFL free agency live updates article receiving 36% of their total visibility.

Rounding out the top five were The Athletic and NFL.com, each with the Athletic peaking in visibility around 3 p.m. Tuesday. NFL.com dominated the visibility the day before legal tampering kicked off.

Looking Ahead

Once the 2025 League Year begins and NFL free agency officially starts at 4 p.m. ET on Wednesday, March 12, we will continue to track the visibility leaders and provide updates. Be sure to check back for more insights, and good luck to all the fans eagerly following their favorite teams!

Upcoming Coverage

Can’t get enough of our sports visibility content? Stay tuned as we dive into these upcoming events:

• 2025 Six Nations Championship
• 2025 F1 Australian Grand Prix
• March Madness
• 2025 WNBA Draft
• 2025 NFL Draft

Until then, check out one of our previous sports analysis

• Super Bowl Betting: How US Publishers Ranked
• Super Bowl LIX: Which Publishers were Mobile News Box champions?

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