We analyzed “coffee shop near me” across 1,000 US cities using live Google Ads data.
A few things stood out:
New York has the highest total demand (301K/month), but 97 cities outperform it per capita
Mid-size cities like Denver, Seattle, and Austin show much stronger demand density
Some markets (Orlando, Scottsdale) combine high demand + strong growth + relatively lower competition
College towns consistently punch above their weight in search demand
The biggest takeaway: population ≠ demand.
Search behavior surfaces opportunities that traditional market research often misses.
Built this dataset with Sextaris — it lets me check demand across cities in one pass instead of doing hundreds of manual lookups.
