ABA Google Ads Market Benchmarks – October 2026

ABA-related searches a month

3,432,230

This covers 100 metros, with each close-variant group counted once. After the entity exclusions and before de-duplication, the same terms summed to 5,339,820.

Searches for a provider a month

405,960

Non-branded searches that ABAOps classifies as looking for a provider – 12% of ABA-related searches. Whether a search fits a given practice still needs checking.

Median average click cost

$16.55

This is the median across the 82 metros where Google priced at least half of the searches for a provider and at least 10 terms. Each metro's figure is weighted by search volume.

Brand share of ABA-related searches

38%

This is the volume filed under provider names our taxonomy recognised, divided by all ABA-related search volume. Treat it as approximate because the classification can miss names or include mistakes.

These are the twenty largest metros by searches for a provider. "Priced share" is the part of a metro's provider-search volume that carries a metro-level click cost in Google's data. Average click cost is the volume-weighted mean for that part; the remaining click cost is unmeasured. A metro is marked thin when priced share is under 50% or fewer than 10 terms are priced. Thin metros are excluded from every highest-and-lowest list on this page.

All 100 metros, A to Z. Each name opens that metro in the market view – its search groups, the largest phrases and a second metro to compare. Figures are monthly averages over the twelve months to the snapshot.

Among metros where Google priced at least half of the searches for a provider, average click cost runs from $7.23 in Mobile to $63.78 in Denver, 8.8 times apart. The median metro is $16.55. Each figure covers only the priced part of that metro's provider-search volume, shown as its priced share.

Average click cost varies widely between metros. The data does not separate geography from the mix of terms and advertisers in each metro. It does show why a monthly cap is agreed per practice rather than set by rule.

Market size does not translate directly into ABA search demand. Austin is the 36th-largest television market by households (Nielsen, 2024-25 season) and the 13th-largest of these 100 metros for ABA searches for a provider.

Among the twenty largest ABA search markets, one ranks at least ten places higher for searches for a provider than for television households. It is shown below.

Across metros that are not thin, the median brand share of ABA-related search volume is 36%. Among those metros, the share ranges from 25% in Cleveland to 74% in Charlotte.

A high share means provider names account for a large part of a metro's ABA-related searches. The practice decides whether to advertise on its own name. Brand share shows how much of this term set is searched that way. It does not identify who searched or why, or what a brand or generic campaign would add.

The branded segment contains the provider names our taxonomy recognised when the term set was classified. It can miss names and include terms filed there by mistake. Every brand share on this page is approximate.

Dividing a $2,500 monthly media budget by the metro's average click cost gives about 346 clicks in Mobile and about 39 in Denver. This illustrates the spread; it is not a plan or a forecast of what a campaign will get. Once a campaign runs, auction prices differ from a year's average. Clicks are not ad inquiries.

The median ratio of average click cost for in-home ABA searches to general ABA searches is about 1.8, across the 37 metros with at least three priced in-home terms. Only the median is reported because the metro ratios rest on few terms and vary widely in both directions.

The monthly figures come from a separate national pull, with the same screening rules applied to the national term set. They are indexed to its twelve-month average (100). They are not the sum of the 100 metro series. September 2025 was the high month at 130; June 2026 was the low at 82.

The series uses the 341 of 371 de-duplicated provider-search terms with monthly data. Google's monthly figures are rounded, so differences of a few points mean little. One year does not establish a recurring pattern.

These are the largest provider-search terms nationally. Each close-variant group appears under its shortest spelling. Google groups spellings, plurals and word orders and reports a rounded figure for the group, so each line represents a family of spellings. ABAOps infers the groups from the figures, as described under Method.

• Source. DataForSEO's Keywords Data API returns Google Ads Keyword Planner data. The metro pulls use Google's DMA-region targeting, and the national pull uses the United States. The data is stored as received. The snapshot is October 1, 2026.
• Search volume is Google's average monthly searches over the trailing twelve months for a keyword or its close-variant group. Click cost is the amount advertisers paid per click on the keyword, as reported in the same data; the period behind it is Google's. Neither is a forecast.
• Term set. Every metro uses the same set of ABA-related terms. ABAOps' taxonomy classifies them into seven planning segments: Local Provider Search, ABA Services, Diagnostic Evaluations, In-Home ABA, Insurance and Medicaid, Early Intervention, and Branded. The 1,194 terms stored as active screening rules, including job seekers and coursework, are excluded before anything is counted. Informational spellings that are not screening rules remain in the ABA-related tier and are excluded from the provider-search tier.
• De-duplication. Google reports a figure for a close-variant group, and our pulls carry it under every member spelling. Within a metro, spellings are treated as a group when they have the same volume, twelve-month series and click cost (or no price on either) and share a word, after "applied behavior analysis" is read as "aba", plurals are trimmed and stop words dropped; sharing chains across the group. Each group is counted once under its shortest spelling. This is inferred from the figures; it is not Google's own group identifier. Sums and weighted averages use the de-duplicated set, with raw sums shown alongside.
• Searches for a provider. These are non-branded terms with transactional or commercial intent that pass the same verdict-and-classifier screening rules used by the ABAOps campaign build before bidding. They must name no other metro's geography and contain no informational marker, such as what, criteria, dsm, level or age. Informational searches such as the bare "aba" remain ABA-related and are not counted as searches for a provider. An "aba" plus city term counts only when Google priced it in that metro.
• Entity collisions. "ABA" is shared with other things. Three terms the taxonomy files under ABA, "aba austin", "aba chicago" and "aba nashville", together with their review and state-name spellings, are removed from every figure on this page, including the ABA-related totals. Google's own results for them return a restaurant named Aba with locations in those three cities (checked September 16, 2026); in the September 2026 snapshot their home-metro figures were outliers, 49,500 searches a month at $2.11 a click, 22,200 at $2.28 and 33,100 at $3.11, and the Nashville term had risen from 1,900 searches a month to 27,100 in the month the restaurant opened there and to 40,500 the month after. Other "aba" plus city terms count only when priced in their metro. The build script refuses to write the data file if a new term of that shape reaches 5,000 searches a month under $5 a click.
• Reviewed terms. On September 20, 2026 every provider-search term in the September 2026 snapshot was read. Ninety-five terms that are not searches for an ABA provider – general therapist, counseling or medical searches that name a town, unrelated organizations, and two that are not provider searches at all – and 46 terms that name a provider or organization were removed from every figure on this page. Thirty-six terms that name a town now count as searches for a provider only in metros of that town's state. A term admitted because it names a place must also be about ABA or autism. The review lowered that snapshot's searches for a provider from 446,540 to 419,630 a month and moved Austin from 8th to 13th among the 100 metros. A second reading on September 21, 2026, with an independent review of every phrase the market view names, removed 20 terms about assessment methods, instruments and lab or online tests – what a practitioner, a student or a do-it-yourself reader looks up – from searches for a provider (they remain ABA-related), four more provider names, and "aba insurance", which belongs to bankers' and lawyers' insurance programs. The figure became 407,140 a month. The same exclusions apply to every later month's numbers.
• Average click cost per metro. This is the volume-weighted mean of keyword click costs for provider-search terms that have both a price and volume in that metro. Brand share is branded-segment volume divided by ABA-related volume. Clicks per budget is the planning budget divided by average click cost.
• Thin data. Many terms have a metro-level search volume without a metro-level click cost. Each metro's average click cost is therefore the volume-weighted mean for the searches for a provider that have a price. Priced share is shown in the market and click-cost tables. A metro is thin when that share is under 50% or fewer than 10 terms are priced. Thin metros are excluded from every highest-and-lowest list and from the median. This month, 18 of 100 metros are thin.
• Coverage. Every metro pull holds the same 2,848 mapped terms after the entity exclusions; the national pull holds 3,585. A metro whose pull falls materially short of that set is flagged in the data. None is flagged this month.

• These are historical averages rather than measurements of an account. Google's volumes are rounded and averaged over twelve months. Average click cost is what advertisers paid, not a prediction of what a given campaign will pay.
• These are rounded search estimates, not counts of people. Repeated searches, grouped spellings and uncertain intent mean no sum on this page counts unique families.
• The ABA-related total reflects the taxonomy, which can file a search under ABA that belongs elsewhere. The three restaurant terms and the reviewed terms described under Method are removed. A new term with the restaurant signature stops the build until it has been checked.
• Many terms have metro-level search volume without a metro-level click cost. Average click cost covers only the priced part, shown as priced share. The data does not establish whether the unpriced part would raise or lower the average.
• Brand share is approximate, as described above.
• Click costs move between Google's monthly refreshes. A check on September 17, 2026 pulled eighteen terms for three metros again and found the search volumes for every overlapping month identical to the September 1 snapshot, while the click costs had changed: by a few percent on the largest terms in Chicago, and by half or more on some low-volume terms. The figures on this page are the snapshot's, and the page is regenerated with each new pull.
• Nothing here says what a practice's campaign will produce. Ad inquiry counts come from the practice's own conversion actions, never from search volume.

ABAOps uses this data to plan a practice's monthly media cap and campaign structure. It also informs screening rules intended to keep budget away from searches unlikely to become an ad inquiry. The same data file feeds the homepage market view.

How it works and how ad inquiries are priced