THE SEARCH LEDGER · BOSTON EDITION · SUNDAY, AUGUST 16, 2026
Every month, Boston types 2,354,100 searches looking for a local business, and advertisers pay $3.05M chasing them. Somebody gets found. Somebody doesn't. This is the weekly ledger of who, at what price, and what's still up for grabs — refreshed every Friday.
Boston searches 6,318,750 times a month in total. The other 3,964,650 go to brands and places — the airport, the hospitals, the universities — which no local business can win. Those 651 brands are tracked separately.
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Before anyone wins a customer, the customer has to ask. Here is what Boston asked Google for last month.
searches a month across the 961 keyword families where a local business can actually be chosen. That's roughly 78,000 people a day looking for something — or someone — in Boston, with nobody in mind yet.
Each square is 1% of monthly search volume.
THE IMBALANCE
Food & Dining is 63% of the demand but only 66% of the tracked listings. A food & dining business here gets 55 searches per tracked competitor. Legal gets about 55.
| Food & Dining | ~55 |
| Attractions | ~55 |
| Hotels & Lodging | ~55 |
| Shopping | ~55 |
| Legal | ~55 |
Search interest by month, 0–100 per vertical. The pink outline marks each vertical's peak — the month the phones ring.
| VERTICAL | JAN | FEB | MAR | APR | MAY | JUN | JUL | AUG | SEP | OCT | NOV | DEC |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Education | 31 | 31 | 55 | 67 | 68 | 82 | 82 | 100 | 82 | 82 | 67 | 45 |
| Shopping | 61 | 61 | 69 | 91 | 98 | 90 | 100 | 64 | 58 | 61 | 51 | 71 |
| Attractions | 30 | 31 | 48 | 71 | 79 | 86 | 100 | 97 | 72 | 73 | 50 | 39 |
| Hotels & Lodging | 39 | 40 | 56 | 71 | 79 | 84 | 100 | 83 | 75 | 82 | 63 | 52 |
| Food & Dining | 63 | 62 | 77 | 87 | 86 | 87 | 64 | 93 | 93 | 100 | 82 | 67 |
| Entertainment | 31 | 28 | 30 | 40 | 32 | 40 | 57 | 44 | 49 | 49 | 46 | 100 |
| Personal Care | 55 | 62 | 76 | 83 | 93 | 100 | 52 | 98 | 93 | 85 | 71 | 58 |
| Health & Wellness | 97 | 79 | 94 | 88 | 84 | 83 | 82 | 89 | 100 | 93 | 79 | 79 |
| Home Services | 86 | 77 | 89 | 83 | 81 | 89 | 84 | 97 | 100 | 93 | 75 | 71 |
| Real Estate | 85 | 81 | 99 | 99 | 100 | 82 | 80 | 87 | 79 | 70 | 68 | 61 |
| Legal | 39 | 44 | 72 | 76 | 89 | 88 | 14 | 95 | 82 | 100 | 53 | 47 |
| Professional Services | 100 | 71 | 71 | 67 | 31 | 27 | 26 | 74 | 69 | 59 | 31 | 33 |
| Travel & Transit | 84 | 84 | 100 | 85 | 78 | 79 | 90 | 83 | 90 | 97 | 78 | 70 |
Breakout searches, recent weeks.
Attention in this city has a spot price, and Google publishes it: the cost per ad click. Here's what a customer's attention trades for in Boston.
"WORKERS COMP LAWYER BOSTON" · COST OF ONE AD CLICK
One click. Not a customer — a click. That's what a single visit from this search trades for in Boston right now.
All 2221 tracked keywords by cost per click, log scale. Amber gets deeper as the click gets pricier.
Every tracked keyword, priced. These are live market rates — the same numbers we manage against daily as a Google Ads Partner.
bar length = CPC, linear scale · amber deepens with price · ad value = searches × CPC · Δ FRI = change since last Friday's pull
Half the people who click leave in seconds. The businesses bidding know that — and keep bidding. Here's the math that makes a $425 click rational, using legal industry benchmarks.
Call and close rates are vertical benchmarks, not promises. But the principle sets every price on the board: a click costs what the customer behind it is worth. Bounce rate is priced in.
ONE CUSTOMER FUNDS
How many clicks a single customer's revenue buys back, at that keyword's CPC. Customer values are industry benchmarks.
Same market, different economies. This is why "is $X a click expensive?" has no answer without knowing what a customer is worth to you.
Monthly ad-equivalent value of all clicks in each vertical — what you'd pay Google to buy the demand you could rank for.
Ranking organically doesn't pay that bill — it makes it someone else's.
High demand and open gaps put Boston near the top of the markets we track. Translation: the door is open — and the rent on staying outside keeps going up.
A market this valuable doesn't sit unclaimed. Here's who holds Boston's front page, who's climbing, who's slipping — and where the seats are still empty.
of Boston's tracked page-one results belong to national directories — attorneys.superlawyers.com, www.justia.com, www.yelp.com — companies with no Boston address. Their share is large. It is also beatable: Google prefers a good local answer when one exists.
Page-one position, last pull vs. this one: greaterbostonhvac.com moved ▼ 5 spots. The chart grows a column every Friday as the archive builds.
Biggest changes between the Aug 8 and Aug 16 pulls.
Movement = week-over-week snapshot diff · arrows and signed numbers, always
Who currently leads the top 6 fights worth having. Leader = top organic result; OPEN RACE = no map pack on the page.
OPEN SEATS
8 of the 21 keywords we track on page one show no map pack at all. An open seat is an invitation. Claim your business profile before someone else RSVPs.
Share of 21 tracked keywords showing each SERP feature.
People Also Ask boxes show on 81% of these searches — answer those questions and you're on page one twice.
Of 1343 tracked businesses, 99% are independents — this is a local-owner's market.
ANATOMY OF A #1
Trapology Boston
Top-rated of 83 tracked Theater
None of this is magic. It's 27.5× the category's median review count. The playbook is public.
Of the 1,343 businesses we track in Boston's map results, 103 have no website at all — 8% of the field, showing up on reputation alone.
BUSINESSES RANKING WITHOUT A SITE
The most-reviewed of them has 1,335 reviews and a 4.8 rating. If they are beating you, it is not because of their website.
Search demand doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from people, their paychecks, their rents, and their broadband. The economics underneath explain the market above.
Sales tax runs 12% below the national benchmark in this market's favor; avg. local cpc runs 110% above against it. Both sides of that ledger shape what customers here search for — and what winning them costs.
Composite of 1 operating-cost factors vs. national benchmarks — sales tax runs below the national average here.
Everything else we track about living and working here — one line each, open what you need.
[object Object] Seasonal swings in the weather show up directly in the demand calendar back in Chapter 1.
Air quality tracked from EPA monitors.
10 institutions and 73,575 enrolled students, led by Boston University, Northeastern University, University of Massachusetts-Boston. A permanent annual influx of new residents who choose dentists, gyms, and mechanics from a Google search.
15 coworking spaces tracked — a low-density remote-work market. A remote-work population searches like a resident but spends like a visitor: lunch, gyms, services near the clusters.
155 tracked events, led by TD Garden Arena Tour at TD Garden. In the news: "Local startup secures major funding round - Boston" (Boston Local News). Event weekends measurably lift "restaurants near" and "parking" searches around the venues.
The 651 brands, institutions and landmarks this metro looks up by name — 3,964,650 searches a month. No local business can win these. They are what the city is.
| 1 | celtics | 165K | |
| 2 | patriots | 135K | |
| 3 | freedom trail | 110K | |
| 4 | boston common | 74K | |
| 5 | bruins | 74K | |
| 6 | harvard university cambridge ma | 61K | |
| 7 | prudential mall boston | 50K | |
| 8 | cambridge harvard square | 41K | |
| 9 | beacon hill boston | 33K | |
| 10 | assembly row somerville | 33K |
5 numbers, one conclusion: the demand is real, the price of ignoring it compounds, and the leaderboard is not settled. The only question the ledger can't answer is whether you're on it.
STEP 1 · TWO MINUTES
Run the free 47-point audit against your site. Five issues free, all 47 after signup. No credit card.
Scan your site freeSTEP 2 · IF YOU'RE ON THE MAP
8 contested keywords have no map pack at all. If your business profile is unclaimed, you're forfeiting by default.
Claim your businessSTEP 3 · EVERY FRIDAY
The ledger reprints Friday 6am — movers, price changes, and open seats, in your inbox before your competitors read it.
RELATED MARKETS
Lookalike = the market our data says behaves most like this one, by search volume, ad prices, business density, and review depth — recomputed on every weekly pull.
GO DEEPER · THE LEDGER BY VERTICAL