Which verticals pay the most in search arbitrage?
The highest revenue per click comes from topics where a customer is worth a lot to the advertiser: insurance, legal services, finance and loans, home improvement, healthcare, education, cars and business software. These are also the most competitive to buy traffic for and the most tightly policed, so high payouts do not automatically mean high profit.
Keyword prices follow customer value. An advertiser who earns thousands from one signed client can bid several dollars per click, and the publisher's RPC rises accordingly. A vertical such as recipes or celebrity news has plenty of cheap traffic and almost no commercial intent.
The catch is that valuable verticals are often a restricted vertical on the traffic source. Meta, TikTok and native networks apply special rules to credit, housing, employment, health claims and financial products, and adverts in these areas are where a misleading ad does the most harm. Profit usually sits in the middle: decent RPC, traffic that can be bought honestly, and a Tier 1 / Tier 2 / Tier 3 geos where advertisers bid.