The Exit Intent Index 2026
Everyone in this market assumes the hard part is finding a buyer. The search data says the opposite. For every business owner typing sell my business into Google, between four and fifteen people are typing business for sale.
This is the full dataset, free to download and free to cite.
The finding
Acquisition intent substantially exceeds exit intent in both markets, and the gap is much wider in the UK. On the single cleanest comparison, business for sale against sell my business, the United States runs at 7.5 searches to one and the United Kingdom at 14.8 to one.
Grouping every acquisition-intent term against every exit-intent term in the dataset narrows it, because there are more distinct ways to phrase selling than buying. On that broader measure the ratio is 3.7 to 1 in the US and 4.8 to 1 in the UK. Both measures point the same direction.
Monthly searches, head term comparison. Bars scaled to the US buy figure.
What follows from this, on both sides
If you are selling: interest is abundant, completion is not. Between four and fifteen people are searching for a business to buy for every owner searching to sell one, and the overwhelming majority of them will never complete anything. So the scarce thing in this market is not a buyer. It is a funded counterparty who pays what was agreed, on the date agreed, without a committee. Judge what reaches you on that, not on how many replies you get.
If you are acquiring: the same imbalance means competition per listed opportunity is brutal, and it explains why the businesses worth buying are rarely the ones being marketed. That is the structural argument for proprietary origination over listing.
Why owners get carpet-bombed
Search volume alone understates this market badly. These are low-volume, extremely expensive terms, and the cost per click shows what the industry is willing to spend to get in front of one owner who is thinking about selling. CPC is what advertisers actually pay, so it is the most reliable public read on where the money goes.
| Term | Market | Searches/mo | CPC | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| sell my company | US | 880 | $33.15 | 41 |
| sell my ecommerce business | US | 210 | $27.56 | 17 |
| sell my business | US | 5,400 | $20.79 | 53 |
| i want to sell my business | US | 390 | $14.20 | 32 |
| sell my amazon business | US | 110 | $11.94 | 27 |
| sell my company | UK | 390 | $11.55 | 29 |
| sell my shopify store | US | 30 | $10.03 | 19 |
| business for sale | US | 40,500 | $0.71 | 26 |
Note the last row. Business for sale has 46 times the volume of sell my company and one forty-seventh of the cost per click. Almost nobody is bidding to reach buyers, because buyers are abundant and easy to find. The money is all spent chasing owners.
What this actually means if you own a business
It means that the moment you start researching a sale, you enter the most expensively contested audience in this industry. Most of the parties bidding $20 to $33 a click are not buyers, they are intermediaries paying to get between you and one, and that spend comes back out of your proceeds as commission. The test worth applying to anything that reaches you, including this page: is the party on the other end buying the business, or selling you access to someone who might? Ask it directly. A buyer answers in one sentence.
The thing the ratio does not tell you
Abundant buyers is not the same as abundant completions. A large share of listed businesses never sell at all, and the ones that do commonly take three to six months of process. Interest is cheap and plentiful. A counterparty who actually closes, on the terms first discussed, is the part that is scarce. Judge an offer on certainty and speed, not on how many people said they were interested.
The UK is roughly a third less contested
On the terms shared between both databases, UK organic difficulty runs materially below the US. This is the clearest arbitrage in the dataset for anyone publishing content in this space.
| Term | US difficulty | UK difficulty | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| business exit planning | 31 | 9 | −22 |
| sell my business | 53 | 34 | −19 |
| business valuation | 48 | 30 | −18 |
| business broker | 71 | 53 | −18 |
| selling a business | 32 | 18 | −14 |
| succession planning | 50 | 37 | −13 |
| exit strategy | 50 | 28 | −22 |
| how much is my business worth | 31 | 25 | −6 |
Where owners actually start
Classifying every term by where it sits in the owner's journey shows that most search demand is not transactional at all. It is orientation. People research what their business is worth and what succession involves long before they type anything containing the word sell.
US monthly searches by journey stage, excluding pure acquisition intent. Ready-to-sell excludes the broad head term.
The practical read
Roughly four times as much search demand sits in planning and valuation as in explicit selling. An owner who searches how much is my business worth is typically twelve to thirty-six months from a transaction, not twelve days. Anyone whose entire content strategy targets transactional terms is arriving at the end of a conversation that started years earlier somewhere else.
Download the dataset
Thirty records, both markets, all fields. No email required, no form, no gate.
How to cite it
Published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Use it in an article, a deck, a report or a thesis. Attribution is the only condition, and a link is appreciated but not required.
Methodology
- Source. Semrush Keyword Analytics, US and UK databases, retrieved July 2026.
- Fields. Average monthly search volume, average advertiser cost per click in USD, organic keyword difficulty from 0 to 100, and a journey-stage classification applied by us.
- Classification. Each term is assigned one of five stages: buy for acquisition intent, sell for exit intent, value for valuation research, plan for succession and exit planning, and route for terms about intermediaries. This is our judgement, applied consistently, and it is the only non-source-derived field in the set.
- Estimated annual ad value is monthly searches multiplied by CPC multiplied by twelve. It is an illustrative figure for market scale, not a revenue estimate.
Limitations, stated plainly
Search volume is an estimate produced by a third-party tool, not a measurement from Google, and different tools will return different numbers for the same term. Intent classification is a judgement call and reasonable people would sort a few of these terms differently. Search demand measures interest, not transactions, so nothing here should be read as a count of businesses actually changing hands. And this is a single snapshot in July 2026, so it captures no seasonality. We would rather state all of that than have someone discover it.
Common questions
In the US, business for sale receives 40,500 monthly searches against 5,400 for sell my business, a ratio of 7.5 to 1. In the UK the same comparison is 14,800 against 1,000, or 14.8 to 1. Grouping all acquisition-intent against all exit-intent terms narrows it to 3.7 to 1 in the US and 4.8 to 1 in the UK. On either measure acquisition intent substantially exceeds exit intent.
Sell my company at $33.15 CPC in the US, followed by sell my ecommerce business at $27.56 and sell my business at $20.79. Cost per click is what advertisers actually pay, which makes it the best available proxy for lead value on low-volume commercial terms.
The UK, materially. Business exit planning has a difficulty of 9 in the UK against 31 in the US. Selling a business is 18 against 32. Across shared terms, UK difficulty averages roughly a third lower.
Yes, under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Download the CSV or JSON, use it anywhere, cite it as: VEKTOR (2026), The Exit Intent Index 2026, vektor-operating.com. If you publish something with it, we would like to see it.
The intention is to re-run it annually so the ratio can be tracked over time, which is where a single snapshot becomes a genuine index. The July 2026 baseline is this page.
Why we published this
We sit on both sides of this. We acquire ecommerce businesses, and we run register-level sourcing for other acquirers. So the demand imbalance in this data is the entire argument for our own model, and publishing it is not a neutral act. It would be silly to pretend otherwise. But the numbers are what they are, the source is named, the limitations are listed, and the raw file is right there for anyone who wants to check the arithmetic. If the data cut against us we would still rather know.
If you are an owner, the valuation guide explains how the number is arrived at. If you are acquiring, the deal origination page covers how off-market sourcing works.