I pull keyword data every month for my clients. Last week I ran the same process on my own market, Tampa, and the numbers were bad enough that I checked them twice against two separate data providers before I believed them.
Searches for “digital marketing agency tampa” are down 80% year over year. Last October that term drew 5,400 searches a month. In June it drew 260.
That is not a seasonal dip. Here is the full monthly series, July 2025 through June 2026: 880, 1,300, 3,600, 5,400, 5,400, 2,900, 1,900, 2,900, 2,900, 480, 480, 260.
It is not just one term
I expected one odd keyword. Instead the whole local agency category is moving the same direction:
| Search term | Year over year | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|
| digital marketing tampa | -86% | 24 |
| seo agency tampa | -86% | 9 |
| digital marketing agency tampa | -80% | 39 |
| seo company tampa | -76% | 12 |
| tampa seo | -52% | n/a |
| marketing agency tampa | -46% | 39 |
| advertising agency tampa | -34% | 39 |
Keywords Everywhere and DataForSEO report the same monthly figures on these terms, to the number. When two providers with different data pipelines agree that precisely, it is not a measurement artifact.
Where the demand went
The same pull that showed Tampa collapsing showed something else climbing. National terms for AI search services are rising fast, and they are barely contested:
| Search term | Monthly | Difficulty | Cost per click | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| generative engine optimization agency | 320 | 0 | $17.24 | up 50% |
| best ai seo agency | 170 | 0 | $17.08 | up 79% |
| ai seo agency | 1,000 | 0 | $16.04 | up 43% |
| answer engine optimization agency | 210 | 6 | $16.94 | up 66% |
| ai seo services | 1,300 | 2 | $19.38 | flat |
| b2b seo agency | 1,000 | 1 | $18.99 | up 11% |
Read the two tables against each other, because the comparison is the whole story. “Digital marketing agency tampa” has a difficulty score of 39, is shrinking 80% a year, and advertisers pay $8.36 a click for it. “Generative engine optimization agency” has a difficulty score of zero, is growing 50%, and advertisers pay $17.24.
The national term is easier to rank for, growing instead of shrinking, and worth twice as much per visitor. That inverts what every local business has been told for a decade about local search being the easy win.
My read on why
I want to be careful here. The collapse is measured. The explanation is my interpretation, and you should treat it that way.
I think buyers stopped typing “digital marketing agency tampa” into Google because they started asking an assistant instead. The question a business owner actually has is not “show me a list of Tampa agencies.” It is “who should I hire to fix my Google rankings, and what should it cost.” That is a conversation, not a keyword, and ChatGPT answers it in one turn without producing a search Google ever records.
If that is right, the searches did not disappear. They moved somewhere nobody has a rank tracker pointed at.
The one Tampa term still growing
There is an exception worth naming, because it argues against my own thesis and leaving it out would be dishonest. “Website design tampa” is up 108% month over month, 1,600 searches a month, and carries a $45.43 cost per click, the highest of any local term in the dataset.
So local search is not uniformly dead. Terms where the buyer wants someone physically nearby, doing a project with a clear deliverable, are holding. Terms where the buyer wants advice about an ongoing service are the ones falling off. That distinction is worth more than the headline number.
What I would do if this is your market
- Stop building pages for shrinking head terms. A page targeting difficulty 39 on a term losing 80% a year is the worst use of a quarter I can think of.
- Find out what AI already says about you. If buyers are asking assistants for recommendations, your visibility inside those answers is now a distribution channel, and almost nobody is measuring it. That is the whole job of an AI SEO agency.
- Keep the local pages that describe a project. Web design, installs, anything with a physical component. That demand is intact.
- Check your own market rather than trusting mine. Tampa is one metro. Pull twelve months of monthly data on your five main terms from two providers and compare. It takes an afternoon.
The uncomfortable part
I run a Tampa marketing agency, and most of our work now is B2B SEO. The single most valuable keyword for my own business just lost 80% of its volume, and I found out by running my own process on my own site.
I would rather publish that than keep selling against a number I know is falling. The work moved. So did we.