DNHQ Research · Australian Click Price Index · July 2026
Introducing the Australian Click Price Index (ACPI): a fixed-cohort, CPI-deflatable price index for Google Ads clicks, built the way the ABS builds the CPI. The 2026 reading is blunt: click prices up 31% in five months, while the pool of searchers those clicks come from shrank 25% from its 2025 peak. Advertisers are paying more to reach fewer people.
01 · Key takeaways
02 · The scissors chart
+31%
rise in Australian click prices in the first five months of 2026 (ACPI, fixed cohort)
The Australian Click Price Index (yellow) vs search demand (blue), same fixed 320-keyword cohort, mid-2022 = 100. Latest month excluded as provisional. Source: Google Keyword Planner histories via DataForSEO; ABS CPI for real-terms series.
The blue line counts how many times Australians searched for these local services each month. The yellow line tracks what one click on a Google ad for those same services costs. Both start at 100 in mid-2022, so you can read any point as "compared to 2022".
For three years the yellow line stayed flat or below 100: clicks were no dearer than 2022 even as searching boomed. From early 2026 the picture flips. The blue line falls (fewer people searching, as AI answers handle more questions) while the yellow line climbs steeply (each click costs more). Businesses are being charged more for access to a shrinking crowd.
Both lines use the same fixed keyword cohort, the commercial local-service terms behind our city demand reports, so no one can attribute the divergence to sample switching. Through 2023 and 2024 the lines moved together sideways; demand then surged to a September 2025 peak and collapsed as AI answers absorbed repeat searches, while the auction repriced violently upward through 2026. Fewer clicks to sell, same advertiser budgets chasing them.
03 · The index, properly built
The ACPI is a Laspeyres fixed base-weight index: each keyword's monthly CPC is weighted by its average search volume in the base period (April to September 2022). That is the same construction the ABS uses for the Consumer Price Index, and it isolates pure price change from mix shift: the index can't rise because cheap keywords disappeared, only because the same keywords got dearer.
A fixed base invites one fair question: what if mid-2022 was itself unusual? It partly was, April 2022 shows a one-month price spike (110) against roughly 90 to 98 either side, which sits inside the base window and slightly raises it. That makes the headline rise conservative. The cleaner view is year against year on matched January-to-May windows:
| Window | ACPI nominal | Real (CPI-adj) | Demand | Price change YoY | Demand change YoY |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan–May 2022 | 101 | 103 | 99 | — | — |
| Jan–May 2023 | 91 | 87 | 100 | -11% | +1% |
| Jan–May 2024 | 85 | 79 | 140 | -6% | +39% |
| Jan–May 2025 | 91 | 82 | 174 | +6% | +24% |
| Jan–May 2026 | 107 | 93 | 144 | +18% | -17% |
Average of January to May each year, same fixed cohort and weights throughout. Comparing identical months removes seasonality and puts partial-year 2026 on equal footing.
Clicks actually got cheaper for two years running: down 10% in 2023 and another 6% in 2024. The turn came in 2025 (+6%), and 2026 is the break: prices up 18% on last year while searching fell 17%. The squeeze isn't a slow four-year drift, it's a regime change that began in 2025 and accelerated this year.
This also answers the base-year worry: pick any of 2022, 2023 or 2024 as your reference point and 2026 still shows the same surge. If anything, measuring from 2022 understates it, because early 2022 contained a brief price spike of its own.
04 · The turning point
+68%
rise in the cost of reaching each available searcher since the January 2025 low
Cost per available searcher divides the price index by the demand index: what it costs to reach each person still searching. Through 2023 and 2024, booming demand and flat prices made attention progressively cheaper, the metric fell to half its 2022 level. That bottomed in January 2025. Since then AI answers have eaten into repeat searches while the auction repriced, and the combined cost of reach has climbed 68%. On current trajectory it crosses its 2022 level within months, with none of the intervening years' gains left.
Think of this as the price of getting in front of one potential customer. When plenty of people are searching and clicks are cheap, reaching someone costs little. When fewer people search and each click costs more, the price of reaching each remaining person rises on both fronts at once.
That combined price hit its all-time low in January 2025. Since then it has risen by roughly two thirds. If your ad budget hasn't changed since early 2025, it's now buying you two-thirds fewer potential customers than you think.
05 · Industry league
| Industry | Price change (yr to May 26) | Demand change (yr) | Cost per searcher (yr) | Index (2022=100) | Keywords |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Real Estate | +32% | +1% | +31% | 65 | 262 |
| B2B Services | +28% | -30% | +84% | 110 | 122 |
| Marketing & Creative Services | +27% | -14% | +49% | 90 | 86 |
| E-commerce | +27% | -11% | +46% | 44 | 261 |
| Fitness & Wellness | +26% | -24% | +66% | 58 | 224 |
| Accounting | +23% | -16% | +46% | 117 | 183 |
| Home Services | +19% | -22% | +54% | 145 | 347 |
| Events & Weddings | +19% | -18% | +50% | 120 | 242 |
| Education & Training | +19% | -18% | +45% | 95 | 195 |
| Legal | +18% | -14% | +39% | 100 | 179 |
| Healthcare | +15% | -23% | +70% | 87 | 297 |
| IT & Tech Services | +13% | -10% | +27% | 83 | 93 |
| Trades | +10% | -17% | +34% | 132 | 263 |
| Automotive | +8% | -13% | +23% | 76 | 336 |
| Veterinary & Pet Services | +4% | -20% | +31% | 103 | 244 |
| Travel & Tourism | +2% | -30% | +50% | 109 | 335 |
| Beauty & Personal Care | -2% | -30% | +40% | 47 | 252 |
| Hospitality | -28% | -6% | -23% | 19 | 226 |
Per-industry Laspeyres indices on the 18-vertical research corpus. Year-on-year columns compare matched January-to-May windows, 2025 vs 2026, where the repricing is concentrated. The index column shows the level vs mid-2022 for context.
The first three columns compare the first five months of this year with the same five months of last year. Reading the top row: a Real Estate click costs 32% more than a year ago on essentially flat searching, so reaching each potential customer costs about 31% more. Green means dearer, red means cheaper.
The B2B row is the squeeze in its purest form: clicks up 28% while searching fell 30%, so the cost of reaching each remaining searcher rose 84% in one year. The final column shows the longer view (mid-2022 = 100) so you can tell this year's movers from industries that did their inflating earlier.
Real Estate leads the repricing (+32% in a year), recovering from deep post-2022 deflation as agencies pile back into a rising market. The squeeze story is B2B Services: prices up 28% while demand fell 30%, so the cost of reaching each remaining searcher rose 84% in twelve months, with Fitness, Accounting and Marketing close behind. The since-2022 leaders, Home Services and Trades, did their inflating earlier and sit mid-table this year. Hospitality is the one true deflation zone: its auction has largely emptied out, and at very low absolute CPCs small moves swing the percentages hard.
06 · City league
| City | Price change (yr to May 26) | Demand change (yr) | Cost per searcher (yr) | Index (2022=100) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sunshine Coast | +26% | -14% | +50% | 127 |
| Brisbane | +26% | -18% | +55% | 122 |
| Adelaide | +20% | -9% | +32% | 119 |
| Perth | +19% | -14% | +40% | 122 |
| Melbourne | +14% | -24% | +51% | 116 |
| Sydney | +12% | -18% | +38% | 113 |
City indices on each city's own fixed keyword cohort (city-qualified commercial terms). Year-on-year columns compare matched January-to-May windows, 2025 vs 2026.
Same idea, by city, over the last year. A Sunshine Coast or Brisbane click costs about a quarter more than it did twelve months ago; a Sydney click about 12% more. Every city got dearer while every city's searching fell, so the cost of reaching each remaining searcher rose everywhere.
Why it matters: if you advertise in more than one city, the same budget now stretches very differently depending on where it's pointed, and the gap widened this year.
Over the last twelve months the pattern sharpened: the Sunshine Coast (+26%) and Brisbane (+26%) repriced at more than double the pace of Sydney (+12%), with Melbourne also at the calm end (+14%). Sydney remains the most expensive market in dollar terms, but the inflation is concentrated where auctions are thinner, consistent with the Opportunity Index finding that smaller markets carry less competitive slack to absorb shocks.
07 · What to do about it
Methodology & more
Data: monthly search volume, CPC (AUD-converted at reporting) and competition for 9,818 Australian keywords, August 2021 to June 2026, from Google Keyword Planner histories via DataForSEO (Labs historical keyword data, location Australia, language English). The headline index runs on the fixed 498-keyword cohort behind our city demand reports, of which 320 pass the continuous-CPC filter; industry tables use the 18-vertical research corpus (9,331 keywords). Construction: Laspeyres fixed base-weight index, base April to September 2022, the same family of method the ABS uses for the CPI; Paasche sensitivity published; ABS All-Groups CPI (weighted average of eight capitals) for real-terms deflation; latest provisional month always excluded. Reconciliation note: our demand deep-dives report January to April year-on-year changes on unweighted city sums; the ACPI demand line is base-weighted and indexed to mid-2022, so levels differ while the direction agrees. Both are published. Limitations: Keyword Planner CPCs are Google's estimates of top-of-page bids, not invoiced CPCs; a pooled, anonymised comparison against actual client-account CPCs is planned as the next layer, and treasury-grade precision is not claimed. The index is a market indicator.
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