Key findings Study 1: The authority gap Study 2: Who owns page one?Study 3: What operators publish The Qatar Executive anomaly The full Index: 97 operators Methodology What operators should do FAQ

BLOG/Original Research/July 2026 · Refreshed quarterly

The Private Jet SEO Index 2026

Who actually owns charter demand online? We benchmarked 97 verified charter operators against the brokers who sell their capacity. The operators fly the aircraft. The brokers own the internet.

Jacob Milner·Founder, EpicEdits·Published July 15, 2026·15 min read

Who owns charter demand online?

Average Ahrefs Domain Rating, July 2026

Charter brokers55

Charter operators33

epicedits.co.uk · Private Jet SEO Index 2026 · DR scale 0 to 100

22%Page-one results held by operators

74%Page-one results held by intermediaries

33 vs 55Average operator DR vs broker DR

8 of 97Operators that beat the broker average

Charter operators pay brokers 10 to 15% commission on bookings they could have won directly. We wanted to know why that keeps happening.

So we measured it. We benchmarked the website authority of 97 verified charter operators against the brokers who sell their capacity. We classified every page-one result for ten of the highest-intent charter searches. And we audited what operator websites actually publish.

The answer is stark. The operators fly the aircraft. The brokers own the internet.

Key findings

Operators hold just 22% of page-one results across ten high-intent charter searches. Brokers and marketplaces hold 74%.
One company, VistaJet, accounts for a third of all operator appearances on page one. Strip out the giants and independent operators hold 14% of the results for searches about their own product.
On "private jet London to Nice", the busiest corridor in European private aviation, not a single operator appears on page one. Ten results, all intermediaries.
The average charter operator scores an Ahrefs Domain Rating of 33. The eight leading charter brokers average 55. Only 8 of 97 operators beat the broker average, and all eight are fractional giants or global groups.
Empty legs are the exception that proves the rule. Operators took 4 of 9 page-one results for empty leg searches, including a Nebraska light-jet operator with a DR of 34. The demand is winnable. Most operators simply have not built the pages.
3 of the 100 operator brands we started with failed verification entirely: one sold its charter arm, one had its charter certificate revoked, one was acquired and rebranded. Their websites still appear in search today.

For journalists and researchers

All findings in this study are free to republish with attribution and a link to this page. High-resolution charts available on request.

Study 1

The authority gap

Domain Rating is Ahrefs' 0 to 100 measure of a website's backlink authority. It is not a perfect measure of anything. But it is a fair proxy for the thing that decides who gets found: the authority of a website in the eyes of search engines and, increasingly, the AI assistants trained on what they rank. It is also the single strongest predictor we found of who appears in AI-generated charter recommendations.

We benchmarked eight of the best-known charter brokers and marketplaces against the 97-operator field.

Broker / marketplace	Business model	Domain Rating
Villiers Jets	Broker	68
Stratos Jet Charters	Broker	67
Air Charter Service	Broker	56
PrivateFly (FXAir Europe)	Broker	56
Jettly	Marketplace	55
Victor	Marketplace	52
Paramount Business Jets	Broker	49
evoJets	Broker	38
Broker average		55
Operator average (97 operators)		33

Sit with the top two rows for a moment. Villiers and Stratos own no aircraft. They employ no pilots and hold no AOC. They out-score every operator on Earth except the fractional giants.

A 22-point authority gap is not a rounding error. In practice it means the broker outranks the operator for nearly every commercial query, takes the enquiry, and sells the operator's own aircraft back to the market with a margin on top. The operator carries the capital cost, the crew and the regulatory burden. The broker carries the customer relationship.

The authority gap by region

Region	Operators ranked	Average DR
Global groups	3	59
North America	40	36
Europe	25	34
Latin America	2	30
UK	8	26
Asia-Pacific	10	26
Middle East	8	21
Africa	1	19

Average operator Domain Rating by region

97 operators across seven regions plus global groups

Global groups

North America

Europe

Latin America

Asia-Pacific

Middle East

Africa

Private Jet SEO Index 2026 · epicedits.co.uk

The UK number should embarrass a market this mature. Eight established UK AOC holders average DR 26, in the country with the deepest broker ecosystem in the world. UK operators are, in effect, funding the visibility of the intermediaries who outrank them.

The Middle East is starker still. The region operates some of the highest-value fleets in the world and averages DR 21, the weakest score in the Index. We will come back to what that means in practice.

Study 2

Who owns page one?

Authority scores predict outcomes. We checked the outcomes directly.

In July 2026 we ran ten of the highest-intent charter searches a buyer can type and classified all 97 page-one results by business model: operator (flies its own or managed fleet), broker or marketplace (sells other people's capacity), or media.

Query	Operator	Broker / marketplace	Media
private jet charter london	2	8	0
private jet charter new york	3	7	0
best private jet charter company	3	4	2
private jet charter dubai	1	9	0
private jet hire uk	2	7	1
empty leg private jet flights	4	5	0
private jet charter miami	2	8	0
how much to charter a private jet	2	7	0
private jet london to nice	0	9	1
private jet charter geneva	2	8	0
Total (97 results)	21 (22%)	72 (74%)	4 (4%)

Page one belongs to the intermediaries

Page-one results per query by business model, July 2026

Operators Brokers and marketplaces Media

"private jet charter london"

"private jet charter new york"

"best private jet charter company"

"private jet charter dubai"

"private jet hire uk"

"empty leg private jet flights"

"private jet charter miami"

"how much to charter a private jet"

"private jet london to nice"0 operators

"private jet charter geneva"

Total: operators 21 (22%) · brokers 72 (74%) · media 4 (4%) · Private Jet SEO Index 2026

Three details stand out.

VistaJet is carrying the entire operator side

Seven of the 21 operator results belong to one company. VistaJet has built exactly the machine this research describes: city pages, route pages, empty leg pages, destination content. Every other operator combined manages 14 results across ten searches. When one company in a 97-company field produces a third of the industry's search presence, that is not a talent gap. It is a decision gap.

Not one UAE operator appears for "private jet charter Dubai"

Nine of ten results for the most valuable charter search in the Middle East are intermediaries. The tenth is VistaJet. Not one UAE-based operator appears for the biggest charter query in its own home market. The region's operators average DR 21, the weakest in our Index, while Dubai demand is captured by brokers headquartered in Florida and London and sold back to the very operators who fly the aircraft.

Empty legs prove it is winnable

The one query where operators genuinely compete is empty legs, and the winners are not giants. Silverhawk Aviation, a Nebraska light-jet operator with a DR of 34, holds two page-one positions for a national search term. Ventura Air Services holds another. Empty legs are the one page type mid-size operators routinely build, and when they build the page, they rank.

That is the most useful finding in this study. A regional operator with a modest website beat national brokers on a national query, because it published the page buyers were searching for. The lesson generalises to routes, cities and pricing, where almost nobody has built the pages yet. Our route page template shows exactly what those pages look like.

Study 3

What operator websites actually publish

We audited a sample of operator websites across the Index, covering both the operators who rank and the operators who do not. The difference is not budget. It is about six pages.

The six-page difference

What operator websites publish, by search outcome

Operators who rank

Dedicated empty legs page
Published pricing or rates
Route or destination pages
FAQ page
Editorial content answering buyer questions
Fleet page

Operators who do not

Dedicated empty legs page (No)
Published pricing or rates (No)
Route or destination pages (Rarely)
FAQ page (Rarely)
Editorial content answering buyer questions (No)
Fleet page (Yes)

Private Jet SEO Index 2026 · epicedits.co.uk

Everyone has a fleet page. Nobody disputes the aircraft exist. The difference is everything around it.

Silverhawk, one of the few mid-tier operators on page one anywhere, publishes all of it, including its jet card rates, which remain almost taboo in this industry. Transparent pricing is not just a conversion tactic. Pricing pages answer the single most-searched question in charter, and the operators who refuse to answer it hand the traffic to brokers who will.

At the other end of the sample: one established UK operator with Gulfstreams and Global 7500s on its certificate has no route pages, no pricing content and a homepage headline that is a 60-word corporate paragraph. And one award-winning Dubai operator, which to its credit does have a routes page and an FAQ, was still displaying a COVID-19 protocols popup on its homepage in July 2026. That popup is visible to every visitor, every crawler and every AI model that reads the page.

It is the study in miniature. These are excellent aviation companies. Their websites are simply not competing.

The Qatar Executive anomaly

The most striking single result in the Index. Qatar Executive operates one of the youngest large-cabin fleets in the world, including the Gulfstream G700 launch fleet. Its standalone domain scores a Domain Rating of 1, because its web presence lives under its parent airline's domain.

As a standalone search entity, one of the world's premier operators barely exists. When a buyer asks an AI assistant to recommend a heavy-jet operator in Doha, there is almost no independent web entity for the model to cite. It is the clearest demonstration in the dataset that fleet quality and search visibility are two entirely separate assets, and that owning the second one is a choice.

“Fleet quality and search visibility are two entirely separate assets. Owning the second one is a choice.”

Jacob Milner, Founder, EpicEdits

The full Index: 97 operators ranked

Domain Rating from Ahrefs, July 2026. Fleet and status verified against ARGUS TRAQPak 2025 flight-hour data, Asian Sky Group fleet reports and live checks. Spot an error in your listing? Contact us and we will verify and correct it.

#	Operator	HQ	Region	DR
1	NetJets	Columbus, USA	North America	72
2	Flexjet	Cleveland, USA	North America	68
3	Vista (VistaJet & XO)	Valletta, Malta	Global	66
4	Jet Aviation	Basel, Switzerland	Global	65
5	Wheels Up	Atlanta, USA	North America	60
6	Skyservice Business Aviation	Toronto, Canada	North America	58
7	Airshare	Overland Park, USA	North America	57
8	GlobeAir	Linz, Austria	Europe	57
9	Latitude 33 Aviation	San Diego, USA	North America	54
10	Luxaviation Group	Luxembourg	Europe	54
11	Cirrus Aviation Services	Las Vegas, USA	North America	52
12	Clay Lacy Aviation	Van Nuys, USA	North America	51
13	Jet Linx	Omaha, USA	North America	50
14	FAI Aviation Group	Nuremberg, Germany	Europe	50
15	Gama Aviation	Farnborough, UK	UK	49
16	TAG Aviation Asia	Hong Kong	Asia-Pacific	49
17	flyExclusive	Kinston, USA	North America	45
18	ExecuJet (Luxaviation)	Zurich, Switzerland	Global	45
19	Worldwide Jet Charter	Phoenix, USA	North America	44
20	Monarch Air Group	Fort Lauderdale, USA	North America	44
21	Gestair	Madrid, Spain	Europe	43
22	PlaneSense	Portsmouth, USA	North America	41
23	Comlux	Zurich, Switzerland	Europe	40
24	DC Aviation	Stuttgart, Germany	Europe	39
25	Solairus Aviation	Petaluma, USA	North America	39
26	Jetfly	Luxembourg	Europe	39
27	Nicholas Air	Oxford, USA	North America	39
28	Jet Access	Indianapolis, USA	North America	39
29	AirSprint	Calgary, Canada	North America	38
30	Aerowest	Hannover, Germany	Europe	38
31	Sun Air Jets	Camarillo, USA	North America	38
32	SaxonAir	Norwich, UK	UK	38
33	Falcon Aviation Services	Abu Dhabi, UAE	Middle East	37
34	Lider Aviacao	Belo Horizonte, Brazil	Latin America	37
35	Avcon Jet	Vienna, Austria	Europe	37
36	ASL Group	Brussels, Belgium	Europe	36
37	Metrojet	Hong Kong	Asia-Pacific	35
38	Atlas Air Service	Bremen, Germany	Europe	35
39	RoyalJet	Abu Dhabi, UAE	Middle East	34
40	Jet Story	Warsaw, Poland	Europe	34
41	Silverhawk Aviation	Lincoln, USA	North America	34
42	Chartright Air Group	Toronto, Canada	North America	33
43	Multiflight	Leeds, UK	UK	33
44	MJets	Bangkok, Thailand	Asia-Pacific	33
45	Tyrolean Jet Services	Innsbruck, Austria	Europe	33
46	Sunwest Aviation	Calgary, Canada	North America	32
47	Arcus-Air	Zweibruecken, Germany	Europe	32
48	DC Aviation Al-Futtaim	Dubai, UAE	Middle East	32
49	Sparfell	Geneva, Switzerland	Europe	32
50	AirX Charter	Malta	Europe	31
51	Pentastar Aviation	Detroit, USA	North America	31
52	Elit'Avia	Malta / Ljubljana	Europe	30
53	Priester Aviation	Chicago, USA	North America	30
54	Sino Jet	Beijing / Hong Kong, China	Asia-Pacific	29
55	Deer Jet	Beijing, China	Asia-Pacific	29
56	Northern Jet Management	Grand Rapids, USA	North America	29
57	Hera Flight	USA	North America	28
58	Thrive Aviation	Las Vegas, USA	North America	28
59	Prime Jet	Englewood, USA	North America	27
60	Jetvia	El Paso, USA	North America	27
61	Fly 7	Lausanne, Switzerland	Europe	27
62	ProAir Aviation	Stuttgart, Germany	Europe	27
63	Baker Aviation	Fort Worth, USA	North America	27
64	SkyShare	Ogden, USA	North America	26
65	Empire Aviation Group	Dubai, UAE	Middle East	26
66	E-Aviation	Stuttgart, Germany	Europe	26
67	Talon Air	Farmingdale, USA	North America	26
68	Valljet	Paris, France	Europe	25
69	Schubach Aviation	Carlsbad, USA	North America	25
70	Astonjet	Paris, France	Europe	25
71	Summit Aviation	Bozeman, USA	North America	25
72	CSI Aviation	Albuquerque, USA	North America	25
73	Fly Alliance	Orlando, USA	North America	25
74	Albinati Aeronautics	Geneva, Switzerland	Europe	24
75	Air Charter Scotland	Glasgow, UK	UK	23
76	JetSetGo	Delhi, India	Asia-Pacific	23
77	Amber Aviation	Hong Kong	Asia-Pacific	23
78	Aero Air	Hillsboro, USA	North America	23
79	Aerolineas Ejecutivas	Toluca, Mexico	Latin America	22
80	SC Aviation	Janesville, USA	North America	21
81	Phenix Jet	Taipei / Tokyo	Asia-Pacific	19
82	Fireblade Aviation	Johannesburg, South Africa	Africa	19
83	Voluxis	Biggin Hill, UK	UK	18
84	Centreline	Bristol, UK	UK	18
85	STA Jets	Newport Beach, USA	North America	17
86	Catreus	Cheltenham, UK	UK	16
87	PAD Aviation	Paderborn, Germany	Europe	16
88	Trans-Exec Air Service	Van Nuys, USA	North America	15
89	Titan Aviation	Dubai, UAE	Middle East	14
90	Sky Quest	Cleveland, USA	North America	13
91	Arab Wings	Amman, Jordan	Middle East	13
92	Zenith Aviation	Biggin Hill, UK	UK	13
93	NasJet	Riyadh, Saudi Arabia	Middle East	11
94	Hyperion Aviation	Malta	Europe	10
95	Club One Air	Delhi, India	Asia-Pacific	9
96	Shortstop Jet Charter	Melbourne, Australia	Asia-Pacific	9
97	Qatar Executive	Doha, Qatar	Middle East	1

Scroll within the table to view all 97 operators. HQ column hidden on small screens.

Methodology

Operator selection. We started with 100 operators drawn from ARGUS TRAQPak's 2025 Top 30 by flight hours, Asian Sky Group's YE 2025 fleet report, WINGX activity data and regional market reports, covering North America, the UK, Europe, the Middle East, Asia-Pacific, Latin America and Africa. Brokers and pure marketplaces were excluded; every entry holds an AOC or Part 135 certificate, or operates a managed fleet. Group subsidiaries are rolled up to their parents.

Verification. Every operator scoring below DR 20 was individually verified as live and trading in July 2026. Three of the original 100 failed that check and were removed: one had sold its charter business and its FBOs, one had its charter certificate revoked in 2024, and one had been acquired and rebranded.

Authority data. Domain Rating collected from Ahrefs in July 2026.

Page-one study. Ten commercial queries run in July 2026 via US search infrastructure, top organic results only, with ads and map packs excluded. 97 results were classified by business model; hybrid companies were classified by their primary model. This is a single-market snapshot: UK and EU result sets will differ in composition but, in our testing, not in pattern. We will publish localised versions in future editions.

Site audit. Homepage and navigation-level review of a sample of Index operators, checking for six page types: empty legs, pricing or rates, route or destination pages, FAQ, editorial content and fleet pages.

Corrections and notes. During the page-one study we found Ventura Air Services ranking under a different domain from the one in our original dataset (DR 31). Ventura will be added at the Q4 refresh. The Index is refreshed quarterly.

What operators should take from this

The gap in this report is fixable, and the playbook is visible in the data itself.

Build the six pages. Empty legs, published rates, route pages, an FAQ, editorial that answers buyer questions, and a proper fleet page. A DR 34 regional operator took page one from national brokers because it built them. Start with the route page template and the keywords charter buyers actually search.

Answer the pricing question. The most-searched question in charter is what it costs. Every operator that refuses to publish an answer is delegating that conversation to a broker.

Structure for AI, not just Google. Buyers now ask ChatGPT and Perplexity which operator to use, and the models cite whoever is citeable: clear entities, structured data, consistent facts across the web. That is a different discipline from classic SEO, and it is the subject of our GEO guide for charter operators.

Move first in your city. The field is so weak that first movers win disproportionately. The data shows entire regions, including the Middle East, where page one for home-market queries is effectively unclaimed by any operator.

If you want to know where you stand today, our AI Visibility Diagnostic checks how your brand appears in Google, ChatGPT and Perplexity against the operators and brokers in this Index.

Frequently asked questions

Domain Rating (DR) is Ahrefs' 0 to 100 measure of a website's backlink authority. It correlates strongly with the ability to rank in search and to be cited by AI assistants. It is comparative, not absolute: a DR of 33 is not a failing grade in itself, but it is a problem when the intermediaries selling your capacity average 55.

The Index covers 97 verified operators selected by fleet size and flight activity, drawn from ARGUS, Asian Sky Group and WINGX data. We add operators at each quarterly refresh. Contact us to be included in the next edition.

It means your website has little authority relative to the brokers selling your capacity. Whether that matters depends on how much of your revenue you are happy to source through intermediaries at 10 to 15% commission, and how much of it you want to own directly.

By business model. Companies operating their own or managed fleet count as operators. Companies selling third-party capacity count as brokers or marketplaces. Publishers count as media. Hybrids were classified by their primary model.

Quarterly. The Q4 2026 edition will add newly verified operators, localised UK and EU page-one studies, and an AI citation study measuring which brands ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini actually recommend. Operators can request inclusion or a tracked position at any time.

Sources

Ahrefs Domain Rating data, July 2026
ARGUS TRAQPak 2025 Top 30 operators by flight hours
Asian Sky Group YE 2025 fleet report
WINGX business aviation activity data, 2025
EpicEdits page-one study, ten high-intent charter queries, July 2026

Data sources: Ahrefs (July 2026), ARGUS TRAQPak, Asian Sky Group, WINGX, EpicEdits page-one study (July 2026). This research may be republished with attribution and a link to this page.

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