# Search Budget Calculator **URL:** https://organikpi.com/tools/search-budget-calculator/ **Published:** 2026-08-20 **Modified:** 2026-08-20 **Author:** Daniel Shashko > A free browser-based calculator that compares the cost of paid clicks against building organic rankings. It is seeded with measured median cost per click, Semrush keyword difficulty, and AI Overview rates for eight verticals, captured across 160 commercial searches in July and August 2026, and reports the month organic overtakes paid. --- > A free browser-based calculator that compares the cost of paid clicks against building organic rankings. It is seeded with measured median cost per click, Semrush keyword difficulty, and AI Overview rates for eight verticals, captured across 160 commercial searches in July and August 2026, and reports the month organic overtakes paid. Work out whether a budget is better spent on Google Ads or on organic search, using measured numbers rather than assumptions. Each vertical is prefilled with the median cost per click, keyword difficulty, AI Overview rate, and first organic position we recorded across 160 commercial searches. Change anything you disagree with. Nothing you type leaves your browser. ### Your situation Pick the closest vertical. The rest is prefilled from what we measured there, and you can overwrite any of it. Vertical Clicks you want per month Cost per click One-off cost of the organic route Content, links, and the engineering to support them. Your number, not ours. Organic upkeep, per month Rankings are not free to hold. Refreshes, new links, technical work. Months before it ranks Ahrefs found the average page ranking first is five years old, and only 6.11% of new pages reach the top ten inside a year. #### Verdict Paid, per month Organic overtakes paid AI haircut What we measured in your vertical Vertical Median CPC Difficulty AI Overview 1st organic Sources kept ## Where the numbers come from We captured the same 160 commercial and transactional Google searches twice, on 8 July and 20 August 2026, across eight verticals with 20 keywords each. Cost per click, search volume, and top-of-page bids come from Google Ads. Keyword difficulty comes from Semrush. AI Overview presence, cited-source counts, and the position of the first organic result come from our own capture of the results pages. The AI haircut combines our measured AI Overview rate in each vertical with Pew Research’s finding that people clicked a result on 8% of visits where an AI summary appeared, against 15% where it did not. It estimates the share of its pre-AI clicks a ranking still earns. The full method, the findings, and the keyword-level dataset are in [the study this calculator was built from](https://organikpi.com/blog/seo-strategy/seo-vs-google-ads/). ## How the break-even works Paid is straightforward: your clicks multiplied by your cost per click, every month, stopping the day you stop paying. The organic side counts the one-off build, every month of upkeep, and the months before anything ranks. Break-even is the first month where an organic click has cost you less than renting the same click. In some verticals it never arrives, which is a real answer rather than a broken one. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### Is this SEO versus PPC calculator free? Yes. It is free, needs no signup, and runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent to a server or stored. ### Where do the cost per click figures come from? Google Ads data for 160 commercial keywords, 20 in each of eight verticals, pulled for the United States in August 2026. The calculator shows the median for the vertical you pick, and you can replace it with your own number. ### What is the AI haircut? It is the share of its pre-AI clicks a ranking still earns. We combine the AI Overview rate we measured in each vertical with Pew Research's finding that people clicked a search result on 8% of visits with an AI summary present, against 15% without. ### Why does organic never break even in some verticals? Because holding a ranking is not free. In retail, where the median click costs $1.49, a realistic monthly upkeep budget works out at more per organic click than simply buying the click. That is a genuine answer, not an error. ### How long should I assume it takes to rank? The calculator defaults to twelve months. Ahrefs found that only 6.11% of new English content pages reach the top ten within a year and that the average page ranking first is five years old, so twelve months is optimistic for a competitive term. ### Does the calculator account for conversion rates? No, deliberately. We found no study that benchmarks organic against paid conversion on a shared methodology, so the calculator compares the cost of a click and leaves conversion to you.