The IPQ Field Guide

Architecture client demand by metro (2026)

Every firm has a theory about its own city. Austin is saturated. Nobody in Cleveland hires an architect. New York is where the real work is. We pulled Google's search data for 16 US metros and set it beside what our own ad accounts actually cost in five of them. Most of the theories do not survive it.

Arseniy VolosevichFounder, IPQmedia·Updated Jul 30, 2026·13 min read

Start with the number that reframes the question. In the New York metro, the largest market in the country, roughly 3,340 people a month search for an architect across the six terms buyers actually use. In Austin, 310. Not 310 clients. 310 searches, shared out across every firm in the market, most of which end in a closed tab.

Everything below is either Google's own volume and click-cost data, pulled on 30 July 2026 at metro level, or aggregate numbers from the architecture firm ad accounts we run. It is the geographic companion to the architecture firm marketing benchmark report and the market-wide costs in architecture marketing statistics and costs.

How many people search for an architect in your city

Fewer than you think, and the ranking will annoy you. Below are 16 US metro markets with two numbers each: total monthly searches across the six architect-intent terms, and what Google charges for a click on the biggest of them.

The right-hand columns are the interesting part. They show the same metro's monthly demand for the trades a client hires when they skip the architect, and the ratio between the two.

Across all 16 metros, architect intent adds up to 13,040 searches a month. The adjacent trades add up to 68,990. The median metro sends six and a half times more people looking for a builder or a remodeler than for the person who could design the thing properly.

Your market is searching. It is searching for someone else

That ratio is the most useful column in the table, because it puts a number on something firms already suspect. Chicago produces 920 architect searches a month and 2,400 for kitchen remodeling alone. In Denver the ratio is nearly eight to one.

Those people are not cheap prospects. Somebody searching "custom home builder near me" in Dallas has a project, a site and a budget. They have simply decided that a builder is the first phone call, because nobody told them a different order exists. That gap is the whole argument in referral systems for architects and it is why demand you generate beats demand you wait for.

Which is also why the map above is not a shopping list of keywords to chase. You can win the 260 searches in Nashville, and you should, through your Google Business Profile and SEO for architects. It will not fill a calendar. Reaching the other 1,170 people who never type your job title is what paid social is for, and that is covered in Meta ads for architects.

The click price has almost nothing to do with the demand

Sort the table by cost instead of volume and it scrambles. Austin has the smallest architect demand of the big Texas metros and the most expensive click in the whole set at $17.17. Tampa has 65% more demand than Austin and charges $4.99. Nashville is the cheapest click on the board at $3.98.

A 4.3x spread on the same search intent means the local auction, not local demand, sets what you pay. In Austin that auction contains national design-build firms, home builders and every remodeler in Travis County bidding on the same phrase. In Nashville it does not, yet. The trade-off between buying that click and creating your own demand is worked through in Meta ads vs Google Ads for architects.

What our own accounts cost in five of these metros

We run paid social for architecture firms, which means we can put real cost per lead next to Google's click prices in the same markets. Across 18 US firm accounts, $98,724 in spend, 1,808 leads and 690 booked consultations between 15 September 2025 and 30 July 2026, five of these metros have accounts we can report.

Two accounts per metro is an anecdote, so read this as a reason to check your own market rather than as a law. The two metros where Google charges the most are also the two where our leads cost the most, which fits the idea that competition for the same wealthy buyers shows up in both auctions. Below that pair the order falls apart, and Tampa is cheap on Google while sitting third on ours.

Worth saying plainly: a Google click and a Meta lead are different things bought in different auctions. Comparing them tells you about the temperature of a market, not about which channel to buy.

One more figure from Austin, because it is the sharpest thing in this data. Google says about 310 people a month search for an architect in that whole metro. Our two Austin accounts produced 276 direct inquiries in the periods they ran. Those two things are not the same as each other, and that is the point. The demand you can capture in a market is fixed and thin. The demand you can create is not.

How far should your service radius reach

Here is where we expected a clean answer and did not get one. Every firm writes its own service area on our onboarding form before a single ad runs, in its own words, which makes it a clean record of intent rather than a story told after the results came in. Twelve accounts have both a written service area and enough spend to judge.

The list is sorted by cost per lead, and the footprints do not sort with it. The cheapest account in the set covers 25 ZIP codes. The second cheapest covers four states. The most expensive covers 75 miles and the second most expensive covers eight states.

Grouped, firms working from a single anchored radius ran a median of $71.44 against $54.71 for firms who listed several states, so there is a lean in the direction you would expect, around 1.3x. With five accounts on one side and seven on the other, and exceptions as large as the effect, we would not hand that number to anyone as a rule.

The honest version is a distinction about what is being compared. Narrowing one live campaign from five states to two cities does raise its cost per lead, typically by half again or more, which is what three years of running these accounts has taught us. Comparing twelve different firms with twelve different offers, portfolios and price points tells you very little about geography, because geography is the smallest of the things that differ.

What did move the number, on the same accounts, was who the ads pointed at. Firms that named an affluence target paid roughly 2.3 times more per lead than firms that named none, and the mechanism is measurable. That analysis is in marketing for high-end residential architects. If your leads feel expensive, the income tier you are chasing is a better suspect than the radius on the map.

Region beats metro for reading the market

For the wider question of whether work is coming, region is the unit that actually has data behind it. The AIA and Deltek publish the Architecture Billings Index monthly, and the June 2026 reading put the national score at 47.3, with regional averages of South 49.5, West 45.6, Midwest 45.1 and Northeast 44.9. Anything under 50 means most firms billed less than the month before.

That is 41 straight months without a majority of firms reporting billings growth, one of the longest downturns in the index's 30-plus year history. The South is closest to flat and the Northeast is weakest, which is roughly the inverse of where the search demand sits.

The line in that same release worth pinning above your desk: new project inquiries came in at 56.1 while billings sat at 47.3. Inquiries are expanding. Signed work is not. Firms are being asked to quote and losing the work, which is a conversion problem sitting downstream of a marketing one, and it is the same gap the benchmark report found between leads and booked consultations.

Residential and commercial firms do not share a map

If you design private houses, your buyer physically lives inside a radius, and wealth in the United States is stored in specific ZIP codes rather than spread evenly across a metro. That makes geography a real lever for you.

A ZIP list built from property values usually beats a circle drawn around your office, and the cheapest account in our table is a firm doing exactly that. Homeowners in that stretch of Long Island are not a group you reach by widening a radius. The residential playbook is in marketing for residential architects.

Commercial practice breaks the map entirely. The site is local, the decision-maker often is not. Our one commercial account in this data sits in Tampa Bay and its written target is national development companies building healthcare, senior living and multifamily projects, at $64.53 per lead.

A developer running eight projects across four states is reachable wherever they sit, and the campaign is built around the portfolio rather than the pin. That is covered in marketing for commercial architects, running the same engine with different creative rather than a weaker version of it.

A few honest answers

What are the best cities for architects?

By search demand, New York and Los Angeles are far ahead of everywhere else and the drop after them is steep. By cost, the cheap markets to advertise in right now are Nashville, Tampa, Houston and Dallas. Those two lists barely overlap, so asking which city is best in general gets you nowhere. Ask instead whether your city's demand is small enough that you have to create your own. In 14 of these 16 metros, it is.

Is it more expensive to advertise in a big city?

Not reliably. Austin is one of the smaller markets in our table and the most expensive click in it. New York is the largest and sits mid-table at $8.04. What drives the price is how many advertisers are bidding on the same intent, which is a local competitive question you can only answer by checking your own metro.

Should I only target my own city?

Start where you can actually service the work and get paid to travel. Beyond that, our data gives no reason to believe a wider map buys cheaper leads by itself. Widen because your practice can genuinely take the project, not because you are hoping the cost per lead drops.

How many searches does my metro get if it is not on this list?

Scale from the closest metro of similar size and assume the smaller end. Metros outside the top 16 mostly land under 300 architect-intent searches a month, which is under ten a day for every firm in town to share. The lead generation for architects page covers what to build when the local search pool is that thin.

Does a bigger service radius mean cheaper leads on Meta?

Within one campaign, usually yes, because a wider audience gives the auction more room. Across different firms, no. The 12 accounts above run from $28.59 to $94.40 with footprints in no particular order, so treat radius as an operational decision and look at your offer and your target income tier when the cost per lead is the thing you want to change.

Where these numbers come from

Search volumes and click costs are Google Ads data pulled through DataForSEO on 30 July 2026, at Nielsen DMA level, so each metro includes its suburbs rather than the city limits alone. The six architect-intent terms are "architect near me", "residential architect", "commercial architect", "custom home architect", "architect cost" and "home architect".

Google reports "architect near me" and "architects near me" with identical volumes in every one of the 16 metros, because it groups close variants together. We counted that demand once instead of twice, which is why our totals are lower than a keyword tool export would give you.

The adjacent-trade column is the same method applied to "general contractor near me", "custom home builder near me", "kitchen remodeling near me", "interior designer near me", "commercial general contractor" and "design build firms near me".

Cost per lead figures are our own aggregate ad account data, one observation per account so that no single large spender moves a median, over 15 September 2025 to 30 July 2026. Client names are never published. We report cost per lead and cost per booked consultation because we measure them. We do not publish cost per signed project, because that closes in the firm's office and we cannot see it.

One thing we checked and will not pretend otherwise about: we looked at whether it was worth writing a version of this page for every metro in the country. Google reports no measurable search volume for any of the fourteen city-qualified marketing phrases we tested. So there is one of these, with real numbers in it, instead of forty with a city name swapped in.

The city is rarely the reason

Firms spend a lot of energy on the geography question because it feels like the controllable part. The data says the metro sets your click price and very little else. Demand for your job title is thin in every market in the country, including the good ones, and the people with projects are out there searching for someone else to call first.

You can wait for the 310 people in Austin, or you can go and find the 1,710 who are already planning something. The full map of how the channels fit together is architecture marketing. If you would rather have the engine built and run for you than reverse-engineer your own metro between site visits, that is what we do, and we get paid when a qualified consultation actually shows up.