After a 2025 surge, Melbourne search demand has nearly halved

01 · The headline number

Melbourne search demand fell 39% in a year

We pulled monthly Google search volume for 80-plus Melbourne service keywords, "plumber melbourne", "mortgage broker melbourne", "seo agency melbourne" and the like, across 20 industries, from January 2024 through April 2026. Then we compared like-for-like windows: January–April 2026 against January–April 2025.

Demand fell 39% year-on-year. And that drop is sharper than it looks, because it followed a boom: the same basket of searches had grown 31% from 2024 to 2025 first. So Melbourne ran up to a demand peak in early 2025, then gave it all back and more. By April 2026, demand sat about 20% below where it started in early 2024, and roughly half its 2025 peak.

The timing is the interesting part. That inflection, peak in early 2025, steady decline through 2026, tracks almost exactly with the rollout of Google's AI Overviews across Australia. Our companion study found AI Overviews now appear on 37% of Melbourne search results. We can't prove causation from volume data alone, and some of the fall is likely a normalisation after an unusually high 2025 plus the periodic revisions Google makes to its volume figures. But the most plausible single driver is the one reshaping every results page in the country: AI answers are absorbing searches that used to be typed, repeated, and clicked.

02 · The demand curve

The boom, the peak, and the slide

Here is total monthly search volume across all 20 tracked industries, every month from January 2024 to April 2026. The shape tells the whole story: a climb through 2024, a spike to a March 2025 peak of about 161,000 searches, then a sustained decline to roughly 79,000 by April 2026.

This is not a quiet seasonal dip. Fifteen of the 20 industries we tracked recorded a demand spike during 2025, and then declined into 2026. The peak months cluster around March, May and September 2025, after which almost every category turns down together. A synchronised, cross-industry fall like this points to something happening at the level of the search engine itself, not 20 separate local markets all cooling at once by coincidence.

03 · What Melbourne searches for

The demand league table

Here is the demand behind those percentages, written out in full: average monthly searches in the January–April window of each year, for 2024, 2025 and 2026, with the year-on-year change at each step. Read a row left to right and you can watch it happen, almost every category climbs into 2025, then falls back in 2026. Cleaning and pest control lead by volume, with web design, mortgage broking and the trades close behind; the marketing and professional categories are smaller, but, as the next sections show, far more expensive to compete in.

Average monthly searches in the January–April window of each year, Melbourne-qualified keywords. Source: Google Keyword Planner via DataForSEO.

A few categories held the line. Real estate (+2% in 2026) and buyers' agents (−3%) barely moved, and web design (−6%) was close behind, the property and web-build categories proved the most resilient to whatever pulled the rest down. At the other extreme, mortgage broking (−62%) and law (−53%) more than halved, both high-consideration categories where an AI Overview can plausibly answer the opening research question ("how much can I borrow", "do I need a will") before anyone clicks.

The biggest 2025 booms became the biggest 2026 busts. Air conditioning (+164% then −40%), Google Ads (+171% then −43%) and SEO (+83% then −47%) all spiked hard and fell hard. Treat any single year's volume as a moment in a cycle, not a baseline, the planning lesson at the end of this report.

04 · The cost to compete

What a Melbourne click costs

Demand is only half the picture, the other half is what it costs to capture it. Here is the average cost-per-click (top-of-page, AUD) for each industry's Melbourne keywords. The marketing-services categories (highlighted) are the most expensive clicks in the city by a wide margin.

"Paid Marketing" clicks cost $98 each, the priciest in Melbourne, followed by SEO ($47) and digital marketing ($46). Agencies bidding on their own category face the most expensive auctions in the city, which is exactly why organic and AI-citation visibility matters so much for marketing firms: every click you don't have to buy at $50–98 is margin. At the other end, fitness and wellness (Pilates $4, yoga $4) and pet care (vets $5) are cheap to advertise, their challenge is demand and differentiation, not click cost.

05 · Melbourne vs the nation

Where Melbourne is dearer, and where it's a bargain

Is Melbourne an expensive place to advertise? It depends entirely on the category. We compared each industry's Melbourne cost-per-click to the national average. Fourteen of the 20 cost more in Melbourne; six cost less. Green means Melbourne is cheaper than the national average, a relative bargain.

The standout is "Paid Marketing", 280% dearer in Melbourne than nationally ($98 vs $26), a sign of unusually fierce agency-on-agency bidding in the city for a small pool of high-intent searches. Mechanics (+125%) and accountants (+52%) also run well above the national rate.

But Melbourne is a genuine bargain in several big categories. Google Ads management clicks cost 73% less than the national average, real estate 43% less, and SEO 37% less. For a Melbourne business in those categories, paid search is meaningfully cheaper here than the country-wide benchmark would suggest, worth knowing before you set a bid cap off a national figure.

06 · What to do about it

Five takeaways for Melbourne businesses

1. Stop treating search volume as a fixed baseline. The same keywords grew 31% then fell 39% in two years. If you sized your SEO or content investment off a 2025 volume number, you over-bought; if you size it off an April 2026 number, you may under-buy when demand cycles back. Plan against a multi-year trend, not a single snapshot, and re-pull your category's volumes at least twice a year.
2. Assume AI is eating the top of your funnel, and measure it. The synchronised decline across 20 industries, alongside AI Overviews now on 37% of Melbourne results, means fewer informational searches are reaching your site. Shift the goal from "rank #1" to "be the source the AI cites", and start tracking AI-answer visibility, not just classic rankings, so you can see what's really happening above the fold.
3. Defend the resilient queries, they're where the clicks still live. Property (real estate +2%, buyers' agents −3%) and web design (−6%) barely declined. These are transactional, provider-choice searches AI is least able to answer. Whatever your category, identify the equivalent "ready to act" and location-qualified terms and concentrate your effort there, rather than on the explainer content AI is absorbing.
4. Price your paid search against Melbourne, not the nation. Costs swing wildly by category, Google Ads and SEO clicks are far cheaper here than the national average, while paid-marketing, mechanic and accounting clicks are far dearer. Set bid caps and channel budgets off the Melbourne figures in this report, not a generic benchmark, or you'll mis-price both ends. It is how our team runs Melbourne Google Ads for clients.
5. If you sell marketing services, win organically, the auction is brutal. Marketing clicks are the most expensive in the city ($46–98). For an agency, every lead earned through organic search, AI citations, content and referrals is worth multiples of a bought one. Falling demand plus rising click costs make owned visibility the highest- ROI channel you have. It is the focus of our Melbourne SEO work.