The short version
- The market is real and growing. “Chastity cage” gets 54,000 searches a month in the US and 141,000 worldwide, twice what it got five years ago. Competition for it is light.
- Its seasonal cousin exposes a forecasting error. Keyword tools put “locktober” at 8,600 searches a month. In reality it does about 2,500 most months and 50,000 to 120,000 in October. A plan built on the average publishes too late and budgets the wrong months.
- What ranks here is links and brand. The most technically polished page sits ninth. A homepage with a store name that matches the search sits second.
- If you buy SEO, ask for monthly history instead of averages, and check how much of your budget earns authority versus polishes pages. Questions to take to your team are at the end.
Every figure below comes from Ahrefs and was pulled on 2026-09-24.
Why we looked at a market this strange
Savage Keyword takes an odd search term each episode and uses it to show one thing about how search demand really behaves. Strange markets are useful for this. Few professionals compete in them, so the mechanics that polished markets hide stay visible.
This one is less niche than it sounds. US searches for “chastity cage” went from 27,713 a month in September 2021 to 56,918 in September 2026, with barely a dip on the way. Google restricts advertising for the whole category (no YouTube, display or Gmail ads, with serving limited by age, SafeSearch and country), which keeps the price of a click at about $0.45. When paid search is this constrained, the organic results carry almost all the commercial weight. For a seller, that makes SEO the main channel for this demand.
The market in plain numbers
Two terms to know. Difficulty is Ahrefs’ estimate, from 0 to 100, of how hard it is to reach the first page of Google. Ahrefs calls 0 to 10 easy, and 14 is still at the low end. Cost per click is what advertisers pay Google for one visit, a rough price tag on commercial value.
| Search term | US searches a month | Worldwide | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|---|
| chastity cage | 54,000 | 141,000 | 14 |
| flat chastity cage | 4,000 | 11,000 | 0 |
| inverted chastity cage | 3,300 | 8,200 | 0 |
| chastity cage meaning | 3,100 | 8,600 | 12 |
| male chastity cage | 2,800 | 5,000 | 32 |
| what is a chastity cage | 1,700 | 3,000 | 28 |
| pink chastity cage | 1,000 | 2,500 | 0 |
| metal chastity cage | 900 | 2,200 | 1 |
The eight terms sum to 70,800 US searches a month. Two things stand out for anyone who sells online. The variations are product attributes (flat, inverted, pink, metal), so shoppers are naming the filter they want before they reach a store, and almost none of those variations has any competition. And worldwide demand runs two to three times the US figure, so the same pages serve every English-speaking market a store ships to.
The forecast trap: an average that describes no real month
Now the lesson, which sits one search term over. Locktober is the community’s name for a month-long challenge every October. Ahrefs’ keyword overview reports it at 8,600 searches a month. Its monthly history tells a different story:
| Month | US searches |
|---|---|
| A typical month, January to July 2026 | about 2,300 to 2,800 |
| October 2023 | 38,084 |
| October 2024 | 119,873 |
| October 2025 | 50,067 |
| August 2026 | 6,288 |
| September 2026 | 40,773 |
8,600 is the average of one spike and a long flat year. No month has ever looked like it. In my other job, as a psychometrician, this is the first thing we teach about averages: the mean of a spiked distribution describes nobody. (The longer argument is in Measuring SEO Like a Psychometrician.)
Follow the number through a normal planning cycle and the cost becomes concrete:
- The forecast uses 8,600 a month. It overstates 11 months and understates October by roughly 6 to 14 times.
- The content calendar schedules the page for “Q4”, so it gets written in September and published around October 1.
- Google needs time to find, index and trust a new page. By then the August ramp and most of the peak are gone. September 2026 has already done 40,773 searches.
The fix costs nothing but attention: read the monthly series for every important keyword, mark which ones are seasonal, and put the publish date a full season ahead of the peak.
Most markets have an October of their own. For B2B software it might be budget season in Q4, a regulation’s deadline or the week of the big conference. For consumer brands it is the holidays, the January reset or back-to-school. The keyword tool’s headline number flattens all of them.
Who in this market is ready for October? One store is, mostly. House of Denial’s Locktober guide ranks third on Google, behind Wikipedia, and links shoppers straight into 12 of its product categories, which is how a seasonal page should feed a store. Its title says “2026”. The machine-readable date that tells Google when the page last changed still says March 2021. That mismatch takes minutes to fix and matters most on a page whose whole value is being current.
What decides who ranks for the main term
We opened the pages that rank on the first page of Google for “chastity cage”. Three of them explain most of the order.
Second place: the Lock The Cock homepage. The store’s name is itself a search phrase (3,100 searches a month), and 1,277 websites link to it. Its homepage ranks second for the category even though its main headline names a single product and it carries none of the technical labelling that describes a product range to Google.
Fourth place: House of Denial’s category page. A store with a stronger authority score (45 out of 100, against Lock The Cock’s 22) ranks two places lower, with a page that barely uses the phrase people search for.
Ninth place: Castle Megastore’s category page. It has the most complete technical setup on the first page: the page type, the product list and even its returns policy are all labelled for Google. No other website links to it, and it ranks ninth.
On this results page, links and brand explain the order far better than technical polish. Polish still matters, because it shapes how a result looks once it ranks. It rarely decides whether it ranks. That distinction is worth knowing when you read an SEO proposal, because a lot of retainers are mostly polish.
Ranking and being quoted by AI are separate contests
Google now shows an AI-written summary above the results for this search. It cites two Amazon pages and one YouTube video. None of the specialist stores is quoted, including the homepage in second place. The questions Google lists under “People also ask” are mostly about health and safety, and the AI answers them from a marketplace and a video.
We looked at AI summaries across 30 searches in How common are AI Overviews?, and this page is a clean example of what that study shows: a page can rank well and still be absent from the answer most people read first. If your agency reports rankings only, you are seeing half of the picture.
What we would do with this market
If a store in this category hired us, the plan would follow from the data above:
- One page per product type people actually search for (flat, inverted, metal, silicone), each answering the fit and safety questions shoppers ask. These carry almost no competition today.
- A seasonal page on a permanent address, live by July, refreshed and re-dated every August, linked into every product category. October becomes a planned trading event.
- A budget weighted toward authority: earning links and mentions from the publications and communities that already cover the topic, since that is what separates second place from ninth.
- Sources AI can quote: plain answers to the safety questions, because those are what the AI summary is answering today with someone else’s content.
Two constraints shape the rest. Ad platforms and payment providers restrict this category, so organic search has to do the work paid media would do elsewhere. And health questions raise the bar for accuracy, so thin copy becomes a liability.
Questions to ask your own SEO team
These apply to any market, strange or not:
- Which of our target keywords are seasonal, and in which month does each one start to climb?
- Is our traffic forecast built on monthly history or on the tool’s yearly average?
- How is our budget split between making pages correct and earning authority (links, mentions, people searching our name)?
- Do you report whether AI answers cite us, or only where we rank?
If the answers are vague, the forecast in your board deck probably is too.
The savage rec
A market that doubled in five years, where paid ads are restricted, the competition is light, and the biggest month of the year is invisible in the number everyone plans with. Weird categories make the mechanics obvious. Your own market has the same mechanics, just better disguised.
You laughed. Someone else added it to their cart before October.
Send us the keyword list behind your forecast and we will mark which numbers are averages hiding a season, and which pages need to be live before it starts.