What the Ad Libraries Say About the Golden Visa Market

Keyword planner estimates for August 2026 put English-language searches for golden visas and investor citizenship in five English-speaking countries at more than twenty times the volume of the same terms searched from Portugal. The United States alone accounts for about two thirds of that pool. The other finding is quieter and more useful: almost nobody searches for an adviser. Five of seven adviser-intent terms returned no data in any market, and the two that registered sit in the 10 to 100 band, the lowest above zero.

The public ad libraries add the other half of the picture, which firms pay to appear and with what message. They can be read well, and they are easy to misread. A library that shows nothing has usually described its own scope, not the advertiser. For a founder deciding whether to fund paid search, the practical conclusion is to stop bidding against the incumbents for the head terms and to buy the questions buyers ask about programmes, costs and risk, where the answer on the landing page decides who gets the call.

Where the English-language searches come from

The figures below are keyword planner estimates, August 2026: 53 English seed terms, Google Search only, all languages, historical range August 1, 2025 to July 31, 2026. Without an active campaign, Keyword Planner shows volume in logarithmic bands (10 to 100, 100 to 1,000, and so on) rather than exact counts, and its own interface says that more detailed statistics require running a campaign (Google Keyword Planner, August 30, 2026). Totals are therefore sums of band midpoints: orders of magnitude, not measurements.

Source: keyword planner estimates, August 2026.

Only two of 212 keyword-and-market rows reached the 10,000 to 100,000 band, and both were in the English-speaking pool: “golden visa” and “portugal golden visa” (keyword planner estimates, August 2026). The shape fits what the largest firm in the field reports from its own files: Henley & Partners says Americans are its single largest pool of investor citizenship applicants, and that their number rose by more than 75% in 2025 (Henley Global Mobility Report, January 2026).

One caution before anyone builds a budget on the table. South Africa is the smallest of the five English-speaking markets here, at roughly 3,500 searches a month. That describes Google search for these 53 English terms. Search volume cannot see a buyer who arrives through a referral, a webinar or a community, and the share of buyers who arrive that way is unknown.

Almost nobody searches for an adviser

The most telling rows are the ones a boutique would most like to own.

Source: keyword planner estimates, August 2026. Five further adviser terms, “citizenship by investment advisor”, “investment migration advisor”, “residency by investment consultant”, “best golden visa consultant” and “independent golden visa advice”, returned no data in any of the four markets. No data is not the same as zero, and Keyword Planner does not say which it is.

The bid columns are the reliable half of this data. Google defines the high range as “an approximation of the 80th percentile” of what advertisers have historically paid for a top-of-page position, and the low range as the 20th (Google Ads Help, About Keyword Planner forecasts). Read that way, “golden visa consultant”, a query in the lowest volume band, carries the highest high-range bid in the English-speaking pool at €25.64, against €3.29 for “golden visa”. The single highest bid across all four markets was €33.07 for “greek citizenship by investment” searched from Greece (keyword planner estimates, August 2026).

The likely reading is that some advertisers pay a premium for the rare searcher who types “consultant”, on the view that this person is further along. There are too few of them to build a channel on.

Who is paying for the category

Google’s Ads Transparency Center lists the ads each advertiser has run. On August 30, 2026, with the region set to Anywhere and the date to Anytime, it showed the following rounded creative counts, searched by domain and matched to the legal entity Google displays.

Source: Google Ads Transparency Center, August 30, 2026.

Those are counts of creatives, not spend and not reach. The sampled headlines were built on programme names, the same words as the head terms, and several led with a price floor. Astons advertised a Portugal golden visa “from EUR500K”; Passport Legacy stated a “Minimum Capital Commitment” of $100,000; Henley’s search ad told readers that “each year, hundreds of wealthy clients rely on our expertise and experience.” Global Citizen Solutions ran two quiz-format display ads, “Portugal Visa Eligibility” and “Caribbean Program Test.” Nomad Capitalist’s sampled ads sold citizenship by descent rather than golden visas (Google Ads Transparency Center, August 30, 2026). The library does not show which keywords triggered any of these ads, so what a firm “buys” can only be read from its copy.

Counts also say little about delivery. For ads served in the EU, Google publishes the number of recipients and the targeting categories used (Google Advertising Policies Help). On the first Portugal creative returned for each of five firms, the most-served belonged to Latitude, with 2,000 to 3,000 recipients in Portugal over a run from June 8, 2023 to June 1, 2026. Henley’s first Portugal creative showed 0 to 1,000 (Google Ads Transparency Center, August 30, 2026). A firm with 27 ads outran, on that one creative, a firm with about 900.

Reading a library without fooling yourself

The Microsoft Ad Library makes the scope problem concrete. It “contains only advertisements served within the European Economic Area,” and records impressions only from June 2023, with a one to three day delay (Microsoft Learn, Ad Library API). On August 28, 2026 it held just four investment-migration advertisers: La Vida Europe with 29 ads, Lexidy Law Boutique with 21 in the category, Sable International with 7 and Astons with 1, the last listed as not verified. Henley & Partners, Global Citizen Solutions, Nomad Capitalist and Immigrant Invest returned nothing by name, then and again on September 28 (Microsoft Ad Library). That is a finding about Bing inventory in Europe. It says nothing about what those firms do on Google, in the United States or in the Gulf.

LinkedIn’s library has its own clock: it includes ads that ran after June 1, 2023, and each ad stays listed for one year after its last impression, with impressions, targeting and run dates shown for EU ads (LinkedIn Help). An advertiser who paused thirteen months ago has vanished.

None of the three shows what a commercial advertiser spent. Microsoft’s documented ad fields have no spend field, and its own documentation points advertisers to reporting APIs for spend. LinkedIn’s EU layer lists impressions, targeting and dates. Google’s EU disclosures cover targeting and recipients (Microsoft Learn; LinkedIn Help; Google Advertising Policies Help). Any tool that quotes a competitor’s Google spend is presenting a model.

Identity is the last trap. Libraries index legal entities, and brands rarely match them. On August 30, one well-known brand did not resolve by name in Google’s library at all; its domain resolved to a legal entity registered in Türkiye under an unrelated name. The same Astons entity showed as verified on Google and as not verified on Microsoft (Google Ads Transparency Center; Microsoft Ad Library).

A library that shows nothing has usually described its own scope, not the advertiser.

Where a boutique’s money should go

Put the three findings together. The head terms are cheap per click, with high-range bids of €3.29 and €4.99, and crowded with firms running hundreds of creatives. The adviser terms are expensive and nearly empty. Between them sit the programme and question terms with real volume and room to be better: “greece golden visa” in the 1,000 to 10,000 band with a high bid of €11.02, “malta permanent residence programme” in the same band at €9.80, “portugal golden visa fund” at 100 to 1,000 with a range of €1.07 to €4.93, and “greece golden visa lawyer” at 100 to 1,000 with no bid reported at all (keyword planner estimates, August 2026).

The data shows buyers searching for the programme and the problem, and rarely for the adviser. Paid search money is therefore best spent on the question, and the page it lands on has to answer it better than a directory does: the threshold with its date, the costs a buyer will not see in an ad, the cases where the programme is a poor fit. A page like that is also the only answer to a competitor with 900 creatives, because it cannot be outbid.

Exact volumes cost money to see. A small live campaign turns Keyword Planner’s bands into numbers, and a firm’s own Search Console data on the queries that already reach its site beats every estimate in this dossier.