How accurate is SpyFu?

Making big claims to your clients is gutsy, so we document evidence of every single advertising claim made on SpyFu.

We keep cached pages of every Google SERP we capture.

For any single keyword search: we gather the first 100 organic results and note the domain and page for each one. We also gather ads from the first page of results and note the advertiser, ad copy, and landing page for each one. All of that data goes into our database, and we repeat that across millions and millions of keywords.

Ad data can be sensitive, so we get the need to back up our claims.

When we say that some domain was advertising on a certain keyword at 3PM on July 12th 2025, we show a screenshot of that ad.

From that foundation, we can carefully calculate other roll-up metrics like Clicks per Day and Estimated Budget.

Where We Get These Stats

For some time, all of the findings published on SpyFu came as we searched Google repeatedly (across millions of keywords) and used Google tools to arrive at spending estimates.

Since then, we have dramatically grown our data. We now use multiple sources and more frequent updates to come up with the strongest, most reliable data points possible.

Any new data is published instantly instead of waiting to be processed every month.

The figures like costs, search volume and number of clicks are estimates that come from other sources.
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In their keyword tools, Google tells us how many searches each keyword gets per month, and how much each one costs to buy in Google Ads. 

There are a lot of variables that go into each part of the problem — take the organic click through curve, for example: the number one search result normally converts about 21% of searches into clicks. But, when there are shopping results on the page, it drops to about 8%. And what about Ads, and videos, news, images… we take all those things into account — for every single keyword — for every single domain.

Over time, we’ve made many improvements including the example about taking shopping, video and other results into account.

Here’s even better news: When we’re wrong, we’re consistently wrong in an industry. So, if you’re trying to size up your competitors all you have to do is calibrate their numbers against your numbers. Make sense?

Let’s say that your domain is MeatYums.com and we think your Google Ads budget is $10,000/mo. But, you know that you’re really spending $20,000/mo. When you look at your competitor MeatyProducts.com and we say that they are spending $18,000/mo, then you should calibrate our estimate based on your inside knowledge to $36,000.

Being off consistently within an industry comes directly from the noisy CPC and search volume data we get from Google. You’ve probably seen it yourself using the Google Keyword tools. We’re working with the same data. When we’re inaccurate it’s because that input data is inaccurate, and it affects all advertisers or organic rankings across the board.

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UPDATE: Thanks to some feedback, I’ve added a screen shot of exactly where you can get to the cached SERP page screen shots for any keyword.

Even when someone stops running a campaign, we still have proof of the ads.  History is locked in place, and if we said it happened, we can back that up.
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