No Search Volume, Ranked #1 Anyway: How I Decide Which City Pages Get Built

How I decide which city pages get built has almost nothing to do with search volume. On EliteAEO, the AEO agency rankings I publish with David Quaid as editor, the database holds all six industries in each of 45 tracked US metros. A city page goes live only when enough providers there have been checked, and on the first render that meant 3 city pages out of 207 pages.

The gate a city page has to pass

The gate a city page has to pass has four parts, and all four have to hold:

• At least five eligible providers have an office in the metro or list it as a served market on their own site.
• At least three of those are verified, meaning we checked the live site, an independent third-party profile and evidence of work in that industry.
• The metro has local depth: two providers with an office there, one office plus five verified providers, or seven verified providers.
• The metro is a large market, or at least six providers have a local presence there.

The rules are public on EliteAEO’s methodology page, and they date from the first build plan on September 12. The reason for them was doorway pages. Google’s spam policies give pages aimed at specific cities that funnel visitors to one place as an example of doorway abuse. In my read, a ranking page for a city that lists the same remote agencies as every other city is that kind of page, whatever the template looks like.

What the first render built

What the first render built, on September 12, was 207 pages with 3 city pages among them: legal and SaaS in New York, and SaaS in San Francisco. Verification was the bottleneck. Of 154 providers researched that day, 30 were verified, and the gate counts verified ones.

Date	City pages	What changed
September 12, first render	3	154 providers, 30 verified
September 12, later	19	Three verification passes, 136 verified
September 13	60	A sixth industry, local business, plus research into each metro’s gaps
September 28	69	18 providers added, a new methodology, one page taken down
September 29	76	19 more providers, 7 new pages
October 7	79	79 of 270 possible, across 21 metros

The publication rules haven’t changed since September 12, as the methodology’s revision history shows, so every new page in that table came from more evidence, not a looser rule.

Why search volume isn’t in the gate

Why search volume isn’t in the gate goes back to the second draft of the plan, which required “nonzero demand for the city modifier.” The third draft, the same day, swapped that for an opportunity test: how many providers a metro has, what the metro is worth, demand in nearby searches, and whether a results page exists for the search at all. What shipped is simpler than either, the rule that a metro has to be a large market or have six providers with a local presence.

The volume tools would not have helped anyway. On September 30, DataForSEO’s US search volumes had no data for any of the industry and city combinations I checked, while broader phrases like “aeo agency” did show volume. By a strict volume rule, none of the city pages would exist.

Ranked #1 for searches with no measured volume

Ranked #1 for searches with no measured volume sounds better than it is. The searches were “dentists AEO agency near me Denver”, “law firms AEO agency near me Denver” and “medical practices AEO agency near me Denver”, three runs each on September 28, from the fixed question set behind EliteAEO’s AI Visibility Index. In Google’s organic results, EliteAEO came up first in 8 of those 9 checks. Those pages pass a check against the swapped results Google began giving automated searches in late September: many of the same sites were still on Google’s page for those searches on October 23, so my read is that the #1 spots were real at the time. They didn’t last, though. On October 23, none of the three city pages was in Google’s first 30 results for its search, though all three are still live.

But I wrote those searches. A #1 for a phrase I chose proves the pages are indexed and match the phrase. It doesn’t prove anyone types it, and the volume data can’t say either way. My read is smaller than the headline: a page built around a narrow, specific search doesn’t need much to rank for it when few other pages target the same words.

A #1 for a phrase I wrote proves the page is indexed, not that anyone searches it.

What the city-page gate keeps out

What the city-page gate keeps out is easiest to see in the pages it refused or took down.

Office lists without addresses don’t count. One agency’s contact page listed 19 cities with no address for any of them, and a directory profile for another claimed 165 offices. Counted as served markets, lists like those would have created 8 metro pages on their own, each one resting on offices with no address.

Pages come down when the facts change. On September 28 the home services page for Charlotte was unpublished when one provider’s office turned out to be in Greensboro, and the page fell below the gate. Its address now redirects to the national home services page.

Some pages that pass deserve a second look. Four of the seven pages added on September 29 rest on one agency’s listed offices, which may be virtual. They pass the rules as written, and they’re the first I’d recheck.

State pages get their own version of the rule: a state page goes up only if it adds at least two providers beyond the city pages already in that state.

What the city-page gate costs

What the city-page gate costs is pages. With 79 of 270 published, 191 combinations sit in the database without a page, each one a page I could have had from the same template. In my read, on a site that ranks providers, a thin city page is worse than none, because it tells a buyer in that city to hire agencies that aren’t there. Every page added after the gate also has to reach the search engines, and that’s where my IndexNow job quietly skipped updates on 352 pages before I caught it.

Sources

1. How EliteAEO Ranks AEO and AI SEO Agencies (EliteAEO)
2. Spam policies for Google web search (Google Search Central)
3. AI Visibility Index for AEO Agencies, September 2026 (EliteAEO)
4. State of the AEO Agency Market 2026 (EliteAEO)