Canlah AI · Open Data · v1.0.0 · collected 2026-09
Which Singapore industries actually pay for search visibility
3,211 Singapore companies across 90 industries, each counted against a stated evidence tier. Aggregate only — this page contains no company rows, and the dataset behind it carries none either.
What this page deliberately does not contain
The full register holds company rows with verified business emails and phone numbers. None of it is here, and none of it is in the published dataset — the file was generated without those columns rather than with them hidden.
- — No company names, domains, emails, phone numbers, UENs or agency names.
- — Industries with fewer than 5 companies are suppressed entirely (55 of 145). A one-company industry row is a company name in disguise. The cost of that rule is 3% of company coverage; the benefit is that no row here can be reversed into an identity.
- — The weakest evidence tier (organic ranking) is excluded from every rate shown. It is an inference about SEO investment, not a record of payment.
How a company was counted
Every count on this page resolves to one of these. The rates use A + B + C only.
| Tier | Strength | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| A. Proven Google Ads spend | Proven | Captured in a sponsored result on a live Singapore SERP. They pay Google. |
| B. Google Ads instrumented | Strong | An AW- conversion tag found on their own site. |
| C. Pays an SEO/SEM agency | Strong | Named as a client on a Singapore agency's page, re-fetched and string-matched against the live page. |
| D. SEO-invested | Inferred only | Ranks top-10 organically on 2+ commercial keywords. Nobody can pay Google for organic rank — this is an inference about SEO investment, not a payment record, and it is excluded from every rate on this page. |
Where search spend is normal
Industries with at least 10 companies, ranked by the share with proven paid-search evidence.
| Industry | Companies | With evidence | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Consumer Retail & E-commerce | 11 | 11 | 100% |
| Furniture & Home Furnishing Retail | 10 | 10 | 100% |
| Telco, Fibre Broadband & Mobile Plans | 17 | 14 | 82.4% |
| Health Screening, GP Clinics & Vaccination / Travel Medicine | 28 | 19 | 67.9% |
| Furniture & Fit-Out Suppliers | 53 | 35 | 66% |
| Catering, F&B & Restaurant Groups | 73 | 48 | 65.8% |
| Insurance & Financial Advisory | 59 | 38 | 64.4% |
| Plumbing, Handyman & Electrician | 38 | 24 | 63.2% |
| ERP / CRM / HRMS Software Vendors | 52 | 32 | 61.5% |
| Testing, Inspection, Certification & Calibration (TIC) | 27 | 16 | 59.3% |
| Corporate Training / WSQ / SkillsFuture | 65 | 38 | 58.5% |
| Industrial Equipment, Electronics & Components Distribution | 52 | 30 | 57.7% |
Where almost nobody is buying
The same measure, at the other end. Read these as thin evidence, not as proven absence — a company can spend without leaving any of the three signals we can see.
| Industry | Companies | Rate |
|---|---|---|
| Security services & manpower | 24 | 12.5% |
| Waste Disposal, House Clearance & Recycling | 29 | 20.7% |
| Veterinary Clinics & Pet Care Services | 23 | 21.7% |
| IVF, Fertility & Specialist Medical | 26 | 23.1% |
| Eldercare, Nursing & Home Care | 30 | 23.3% |
| Software Development & App Agencies | 32 | 25% |
| Branding, design & creative agencies | 28 | 25% |
| HR, Recruitment, Staffing & EOR | 51 | 25.5% |
The largest industries in the sample
| Industry | Companies | SG-verified | Proven ads | Agency clients |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Catering, F&B & Restaurant Groups | 73 | 59 | 20 | 23 |
| Renovation & Interior Design | 69 | 62 | 13 | 6 |
| TCM / Chiropractic / Physiotherapy | 68 | 62 | 12 | 9 |
| Tuition & Enrichment Centres | 68 | 64 | 12 | 19 |
| Printing, signage & corporate gifts | 67 | 62 | 20 | 2 |
| Corporate Training / WSQ / SkillsFuture | 65 | 57 | 19 | 6 |
| Aesthetics / Dermatology / Plastic Surgery | 65 | 59 | 4 | 12 |
| Insurance & Financial Advisory | 59 | 46 | 23 | 12 |
| Law Firms & Legal Services | 58 | 47 | 17 | 7 |
| Freight Forwarding & Shipping | 58 | 25 | 12 | 4 |
| Photography & videography production | 56 | 50 | 19 | 1 |
| Travel agencies, tours & MICE | 55 | 31 | 10 | 5 |
Method, and where it is wrong
2,040 commercial-intent Singapore queries across 80 verticals were run through a third-party SERP API
with gl=sg. Company sites
were then fetched and checked for a Singapore UEN, a +65 contact, or an
AW- conversion tag.
Agency client claims were re-fetched and string-matched against the live page; 95.1% passed and the
failures were dropped.
The 16.7% we got wrong
An adversarial audit of 60 randomly drawn companies found a 16.7% error rate. Every error was the
same failure mode: the global .com
portal of a multinational advertising into Singapore, read as a Singapore entity. That mode was then
corrected across the whole dataset — but the audit predates the correction, so treat 16.7% as the
ceiling on residual error, not as the current rate. We publish it because a dataset that claims no
errors is not one you should cite.
- — Absence is not proof. A company can buy search visibility without leaving any of the three signals we can observe. Every rate here is a floor.
- — The frame is our query set, not Singapore. 80 verticals chosen for commercial intent. Do not project these rates onto the Singapore economy.
- — Underlying observations are not redistributed. The raw SERP responses were collected through a third-party provider and stay with us; what is published here is our own aggregate analysis of them.
Citing this
The analysis on this page is released under CC BY 4.0. We claim no rights in the underlying search observations.
Canlah AI (2026). Which Singapore Industries Actually Pay for Search Visibility (2026). v1.0.0. https://canlah.ai/data/singapore-search-spend-2026/
Published 2026-09-03 · 90 of 145 industries · 55 suppressed under the 5-company minimum · 3,211 of 3,308 companies retained