I checked the search volume for my own product category. It was 110 a month, and falling.

All figures below come from Google Ads Keyword Planner, United States, October 2025 to September 2026, pulled from our own Ads account.

I built an idea-validation tool. Before writing the launch copy, I did the thing the tool itself does: I checked whether anyone was actually searching for it.

Here is the entire category, monthly US search volume:

The biggest term in my category gets 110 searches a month in the United States. The category as a whole is shrinking.

What that actually means

I had, before this, written a plan that involved ranking for "idea validation tool". That term gets ten searches a month and has fallen 89% year on year. Ranking first for it would be worth roughly nothing, and I'd have spent weeks on it.

Worth saying plainly: since Google's 2012 exact-match-domain update, having the keyword in your domain doesn't lift rankings either. I'd half-assumed otherwise.

So SEO is not a channel for this product. Not "SEO is hard" — SEO is not a channel. There is no traffic at the end of it. That's a different conclusion and it changes what you do on Monday morning.

The part that was actually useful

Look at the two terms growing at +600%:

• "how do I know if my…"
• "how to know if my…"

And "test your idea" at +200%.

Every growing term in a shrinking category is a question. Nobody is shopping for an "idea validation tool". People are asking a question, in sentences, and increasingly they're asking it somewhere that answers in prose rather than a list of blue links.

That doesn't mean "write blog posts and rank for questions" — the volumes are still 40 a month. It means the demand that exists is conversational, and the place to be is wherever those conversations happen: forums, communities, and the answer engines that get cited.

The uncomfortable bit

The honest reading of this data is that my category has very little search demand and what exists is declining. That's not a reason not to build — plenty of real businesses exist in categories nobody searches for. It's a reason not to build a search-led acquisition plan, which is what I was about to do.

That took twenty minutes in Keyword Planner and saved a month.

If you're about to start on SEO for something, go and look at the actual numbers for your actual terms first. Not the category you imagine you're in. The words people type.

We build Cruxproof, which does this kind of check on startup ideas. First validation is free.