How this site measures demand

Every search-volume figure that appears anywhere on this site traces to a specific, dated data pull from a named tool, recorded in a research file that can be checked against the page that cites it. Where a figure is not stated, that is either because the term was measured and genuinely returned no data, or because it was never queried at all — and the two are recorded differently rather than left to look the same.

The measurement stack

Layer	Tool	What it measures	Where it’s recorded
Google search volume	DataForSEO Labs API	Estimated monthly Google searches, Australia-scoped (location_code 2036)	research/national-volume-au.json
Keyword difficulty and CPC	DataForSEO Labs / Google Ads data	How competitive a term is to rank for, and its paid-search cost	research/cpc-competition-au.json
AI-assistant prompt volume	DataForSEO AI Optimization	Estimated monthly prompts to AI assistants matching a phrase or question	research/ai-vol-keywords.json and research/ai-vol-questions.json
SERP intent	Manual inspection of actual search results	Whether the ranking pages for a term are commercial, informational or something else entirely	research/serp-*.json files, reviewed by hand

Why every figure carries a date

Search volume changes over time, and a figure with no date attached is a claim with no way to be checked against reality later. Every measurement on this site is stamped with the date it was pulled — most of the current dataset was gathered 31 July 2026 — so that a stale number can be identified as stale rather than mistaken for a current one. The full detail of this discipline, including how figures are refreshed, is on methodology.

Why “measured null” is different from “not measured”

A term that was queried and genuinely returned no detectable search volume is recorded as null, with the tool and date that produced that result. A term nobody has queried at all is recorded differently, or not asserted as a volume figure at all. This distinction matters because a null result is itself information — it tells you the phrase is not how people search, which is a different and more useful fact than simply not knowing.

Why volume does not decide what gets covered

A page on this site is not required to clear a search-volume threshold to exist. Volume decides whether a page is treated as a commercial “money page” — one that a business would be routed toward with confidence that a real market searches for it — and it decides publishing sequence. It does not decide whether a genuine attribute of web design, such as what a wireframe is or how a website contract should be structured, deserves a page. Many of the pages in this cluster and elsewhere on the site carry no measurable Google volume at all, and are published anyway because they cover something true and useful about commissioning a website, independent of how many people type the exact phrase into a search box.

SERP intent — the check that matters more than the number

A term’s volume figure says nothing about what kind of page actually satisfies that search. Some phrases that look commercial return search results dominated by portfolios, inspiration galleries or educational content rather than suppliers — and treating those as buyer-intent commercial terms would be a mistake regardless of how large the volume figure is. Checking this by hand, against the actual search results, is a separate and equally important step to pulling the number, and it is recorded in the same research files.

The limit worth stating plainly

Search-volume tools estimate; they do not directly observe Google’s or an AI assistant’s internal query logs. Two tools querying the same term can disagree, and a figure from mid-2026 will drift as behaviour changes. Treat every number on this site as an informed estimate with a visible source and date, not as an exact count — which is exactly the standard this site expects of any claim it makes about your business too.

Why competition and CPC figures are measured separately from volume

Search volume tells you how often a phrase is typed; it says nothing about how hard that phrase is to rank for organically, or what advertisers currently pay to appear against it. Keyword difficulty and cost-per-click are separate measurements, pulled from different parts of the same tooling, and this site treats a term’s difficulty and its Google Ads competition data as distinct facts worth recording alongside volume rather than folding into a single number — a term can carry meaningful volume and still be a poor target if its difficulty is high enough that ranking for it realistically isn’t achievable in the near term.

Why the location setting matters as much as the tool

Every volume figure on this site is pulled at a specific location setting — location_code 2036, which is Australia — because the same phrase can carry a completely different volume globally versus locally, and a global figure quoted as if it were Australian is a specific, identifiable kind of error this site’s process is designed to avoid. Any figure that doesn’t specify its location setting explicitly should be treated with the same scepticism this site applies to any other unsourced claim.

What happens when a figure needs correcting

If a figure is later found to be wrong — a stale measurement, a location-setting error, or new data superseding an old pull — this site’s practice is to correct it and note the correction, rather than quietly replacing the number without acknowledging the change happened. The updatedOn field on every page exists specifically so a reader can see whether a page’s figures have been revisited since they were first published, not just when the page was originally written.

What to do next

If a specific figure on this site looks wrong or dated, the source file and measurement date are stated next to it — check them against current data if it matters to a decision you are making. The full discipline this site holds itself to, including how a figure is dated and re-checked, is set out on how this site measures things.

The same method decided which entries appear in the industries section — a page exists there on the strength of at least three distinguishing facts, never on volume alone, which is this method applied to a different gate.