After a flat year, Sunshine Coast search demand fell off a cliff

01 · The headline number

Sunshine Coast search demand fell 44% in a year

We pulled monthly Google search volume for 80-plus Sunshine Coast service keywords, "plumber sunshine coast", "mortgage broker sunshine coast", "dentist sunshine coast" and the like, across 21 industries, from January 2024 through April 2026. Then we compared like-for-like windows: January–April 2026 against January–April 2025.

Demand fell 44% year-on-year. Unlike the capital cities, the Coast didn't boom first, demand was essentially flat from 2024 to 2025 (up just 2%), then dropped off a cliff in 2026. By April 2026 the tracked categories were running about 43% below their early-2024 level. It's one of the steepest single-year declines we've measured in any market.

The timing points in one direction. The break happens in 2026, the same window in which Google's AI Overviews scaled across Australia, and our companion study found AI Overviews now appear on roughly 38% of Sunshine Coast search results. We can't prove causation from volume data alone, and a regional market this size carries more month-to-month noise than a capital. But the matched-window comparison is robust, and 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

Flat and choppy, then a clean break

Here is total monthly search volume across all 21 tracked industries, every month from January 2024 to April 2026. Demand bounced between roughly 28,000 and 51,000 a month through 2024 and 2025, with seasonal spikes (a big one in September 2025), then broke down to the low 20,000s right across 2026.

The 2026 break is broad, not isolated. Of the 21 industries we tracked, 20 recorded lower demand in 2026 than in 2025, the lone exception being Google Ads, off a tiny base. When almost every category turns down together, in the same window, it points to something happening at the level of the search engine rather than 21 separate local markets all cooling at once by chance.

03 · What the Coast searches for

The demand league table

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 most categories hold or rise into 2025, then fall away in 2026. Pest control, web design and the trades lead by volume on the Coast; the smallest categories swing wildly on tiny numbers, so read those with caution.

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

Real estate is the story of the table. In early 2024 it was comfortably the Coast's biggest search category at about 14,000 a month, the tail end of the pandemic-era sea-change property frenzy. By early 2026 it had fallen to 1,660, down roughly 88% in two years. Whether that's the property market itself cooling, AI answering more of the "how's the market" research, or both, it's the clearest single move in the dataset.

Almost everything else fell in 2026 too. Web design (−50%), mortgage broking (−45%) and accounting (−40%) all dropped sharply after holding up in 2025. Be careful with the smallest rows, lawyers (+258% then −78%), SEO (+253%) and Google Ads swing violently because they sit on just a few hundred searches or fewer, where Google's volume buckets round hard. The big, stable categories, pest control, the trades, vets, are the reliable signal, and they're all pointing down.

04 · The cost to compete

What a Sunshine Coast 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 Sunshine Coast category with enough advertiser data to report. On the Coast the priciest clicks are in the trades and professional services, not marketing.

Plumbers ($64) and lawyers ($53) command the dearest clicks on the Coast, followed by web design and mortgage broking (~$30). At the other end, fitness and wellness (yoga $2, pilates $3) and pet care (vets $5) are cheap to advertise against. Note what's missing: the marketing categories, Google Ads, SEO, digital and paid marketing, returned no reliable cost-per-click for the Coast at all. Too few advertisers bid on Sunshine Coast-specific marketing terms for Google to report a rate, a useful signal in itself about how thin that local market is.

05 · The Coast vs the nation

Where the Coast is dearer, and where it's a bargain

Is the Sunshine Coast an expensive place to advertise? It depends entirely on the category. We compared each industry's Coast cost-per-click to the national average. Nine of the 16 categories with data cost more on the Coast; seven cost less. Green means the Coast is cheaper than the national average, a relative bargain.

Lawyers (+83%), mechanics (+70%) and vets (+54%) cost far more per click on the Coast than the national average, the classic small-market dynamic, where a handful of advertisers bid up a scarce pool of high-intent searches. Plumbing ($64 vs $46) and mortgage broking ($30 vs $20) are also notably dearer.

But the Coast is a genuine bargain in several categories. Real estate clicks cost 72% less than the national average, electricians 22% less, and buyers' agents 21% less. For a Coast business in those categories, paid search is meaningfully cheaper here than a national benchmark would suggest, worth knowing before you set a bid cap off a country-wide figure.

06 · What to do about it

Five takeaways for Sunshine Coast businesses

1. Never size a budget off one year, the Coast swings hard. Real estate alone moved from 14,000 to 1,660 searches a month in two years. A small, seasonal market like the Coast whips around far more than a capital. Plan against the 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. Demand fell across 20 of 21 categories in 2026, alongside AI Overviews now on roughly 38% of Sunshine Coast results. 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.
3. Every ranking matters more here, the volumes are small. Many Coast categories sit on a few thousand searches a month or fewer, so the gap between page-one and page-two is the gap between a steady phone and a silent one. Concentrate on the transactional, location-qualified terms ("[service] sunshine coast", "[service] [suburb]") that still convert and that AI is least able to answer.
4. Price paid search against the Coast, not the nation. Costs swing wildly by category, lawyers, mechanics, vets and plumbers cost far more here, while real estate, electricians and buyers' agents are far cheaper. Set bid caps and channel budgets off the Coast figures in this report, not a generic national benchmark, or you'll mis-price both ends. It is how our team runs Sunshine Coast Google Ads for clients.
5. If you sell marketing services, the Coast is wide open, and organic is the way in. There's so little advertiser competition on Sunshine Coast marketing terms that Google can't even report a click price. That's a thin paid market, but it also means strong organic and AI-citation visibility can own the category cheaply, before anyone else bothers to compete for it. It is the focus of our Sunshine Coast SEO work.