Feature 01
Every market gets sized three ways. The whole market. The part that shows up in search. The share one ranked business can take. All in dollars per year.
We start with people. Census data counts who lives in your city and their ages. The vertical's start rate and case value turn that into the whole market. Real search counts shrink it to what is reachable online. Position math shrinks it again to what one business can win.
Source: U.S. Census, live search data.
TAM, SAM and SOM are widely misused, so it is worth being exact about what each one means here. TAM is the total annual revenue of the trade in the scanned city if every person who needs the service bought it. SAM is the slice of that market which actually searches online, since a website can only intercept demand that types something into a search box. SOM is what a single site holding a top-three position would realistically capture.
The market size behind TAM is calibrated against published federal business receipts rather than assumed. That matters more than it sounds. An earlier version of this model was built from category assumptions and landed anywhere from a twentieth to thirty times the real figure depending on the trade, which is the difference between a useful number and a decorative one.
SAM is capped at TAM, because a serviceable market cannot exceed the total market. Search volume is measured across the whole metro while the market is sized on the city, so in a dense metro the search demand can imply more business than the city alone supports. When that happens the report says so rather than quietly printing a larger number.
Every method has edges. These are the ones worth knowing before you lean on this.
Published federal business statistics, combining employer businesses with sole proprietors. Leaving sole traders out understates whole trades: in barbering they are ninety-five percent of the businesses and most of the revenue.
Because one site does not take a market. SOM assumes you hold a strong position and convert a realistic share of the traffic it brings, which is a small fraction of everything searched.