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.
Content, links, and the engineering to support them. Your number, not ours.
Rankings are not free to hold. Refreshes, new links, technical work.
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.
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.