March Madness 2026: Which keywords and publishers were champions in Mobile News Box visibility?
7. April 2026On Monday night at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, No. 1 seed Michigan defeated No. 2 seed UConn 69-63 to claim the Men’s NCAA Tournament title. By earning their second NCAA basketball title, the Wolverines denied the Huskies a third national championship in four seasons.
We used the Trisolute News Dashboard to analyze Mobile News Box keyword rankings and publisher visibility over the course of the tournament, from March 17-April 6, 2026. Let’s dive into the data.
Keywords
We reviewed approximately 150 keywords related to the NCAA basketball tournament, which earned 21,215 Mobile News Box keyword rankings.
Publishers
In Mobile News Box visibility, espn.com was the clear winner. They were able to secure the most rankings for the majority of the top 10 keywords. They had two large peaks in SERP visibility during the tournament period.
Top 5 publishers:
- espn.com
- yahoo.com
- usatoday.com
- cbssports.com
- nytimes.com/athletic
YOY insights:
- Top 5 publishers were similar YOY.
- Bracket-related keywords appeared 4 times in the top 10 this year, vs. just once in 2025.
- The keyword “women’s march madness” declined a bit YOY, dropping from 2nd to 4th place. This year, “men’s march madness” was able to overtake “women’s march madness” in visibility.
- We found similar spikes in Mobile News Box visibility for espn.com YOY.
AIO and AI Mode insights
Only 4% of Mobile News Box SERPS had an AI Overview for keywords related to March Madness during the tournament period. The keyword “michigan” triggered the highest number of SERPs with an AIO.
AI Mode: The top 5 publishers largely mirrored the top 5 publishers in Mobile News Box SERP rankings, with the exception that ncaa.com was cited the most in AI Mode during the tournament period. (It’s important to note that our AI Mode report is in beta testing so this should not be considered as conclusive results.)
Social media platform impact
When we review Mobile News Box data that also includes social-friendly SERP ranking types such as “What people are saying,” x.com moves into the lead in Mobile News Box visibility and Instagram moves into 3rd place. The top traditional news publisher remains espn.com.
Below is a chart that isolates to just social-friendly SERP ranking types, to offer a perspective on the visibility of major social media platforms during the NCAA basketball tournament.
Publisher insights
With as much disruption as we’ve seen on the SERPs recently, the results for March Madness are similar to what we saw in 2025. While past data can help inform current strategy, each major sporting event moving forward should also be analyzed for impact from Google’s AI search features and the increase in social media platforms’ visibility on the SERPs.
For March Madness, it’s about keeping a pulse on the teams and players that are drawing the greatest search interest, and delivering updates quickly and accurately to maintain SERP visibility and audience trust. It’s a highly competitive event both on and off the court, so publishers keen on improving their visibility should review the data over the last couple of years to gain insights on how the same publishers year over year deliver a winning search performance.
Check out more sports-related analysis from the Trisolute News Dashboard:
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