The first time I set foot in Pakistan I was 31, and I was not visiting. I was moving here to build a team. I got it wrong twice before I got it right, and today we run ten plus people on site and forty plus remote out of Lahore. It is the best team I have ever worked with.
For most of those years I was an introvert about this industry. I never built a network, never met the people running it face to face, never posted anything anywhere. Then a video I recorded for my nieces about bidding on Upwork hit sixty thousand views, and it pulled me out of hiding. Over the last few months I have been doing the exact things the old version of me avoided: sitting with the top CEOs and the top people in tech in Pakistan, conferences, seminars, gatherings, trips like TechTrip 2.0 in Nathia Gali and LEAP in Saudi Arabia. Long conversations, usually over more chai than is medically advisable. Meeting those people is what started me thinking, and that thinking is what led to this.
And almost every one of those conversations, at some point, turned to the same thing. The services business is changing. Faster than anyone expected. Nobody was panicking, these are serious operators, but they were honest that the old ways of winning work are not working like they used to. Clients ask different questions. Leads arrive from different places. A lot of the marketing every agency in the country has done for ten years is starting to feel like it is talking to an empty room.
That stuck with me, because I have looked at hundreds of agency websites from Pakistan over the years, and they nearly all say the same thing in the same place. "Leading software house in Pakistan." "Top software development company in Lahore." "Best IT company in Pakistan." Title tag, hero headline, footer, About page.
I understood why. It is honest. It is who we are. If a buyer in New York or Dubai wants a Pakistani team, surely that is what they type.
Then it hit me that I had never actually checked. Nobody I know has either. We all just assumed.
So I checked.
What I actually did
I am not an SEO agency, so I kept this simple. One honest answer to one question: when a foreign buyer wants to hire a software team from Pakistan, how many of them search for it, and what do they type?
I took 182 phrases. Everything from "software house lahore" to "hire developers in pakistan" to "ui ux design agencies in islamabad", with the "best" and "top" variations, seven cities, and the word Pakistan on its own. I pulled twelve months of search volume for every one of them, separately for 22 countries, because I did not just want to know how many people search. I wanted to know where they are sitting when they do.
Then I looked at the actual Google results in the US, the UK, the UAE and here at home, to see who wins those searches today. I checked what the big agency directories earn from them. And, because this is 2026, I asked ChatGPT and Gemini the same questions a real buyer would ask, to see who they name and where they get their answers.
I expected to find a modest stream of foreign buyers and to learn how to catch more of it.
That is not what I found.
The first surprise: almost nobody abroad searches for "Pakistani software house"
Roughly how many monthly searches those 182 phrases get, by the country the searcher is in:
- Pakistan: about 50,100 a month
- India: about 2,800 (mostly people looking up "it companies in pakistan" out of curiosity)
- United States: about 2,390
- United Kingdom: about 970
- United Arab Emirates: about 880
- Saudi Arabia: about 760
- Canada: about 690
- Australia: about 660
- Germany and the Netherlands: about 600 each
- Qatar: about 530
- France: about 480
- Ireland: about 400
- Singapore, Sweden, Bahrain, Oman: 370 to 380 each
- Switzerland and Kuwait: about 300
- New Zealand: about 160
Add up every foreign country a Pakistani agency would ever want a client from, the English speaking ones, all six Gulf states, five European countries, Singapore and Malaysia, and you get about 11,700 searches a month. Combined. Pakistan alone is more than four times that.
And it is thinner than it looks. Keyword tools report a floor of 10 for any phrase with a trace of demand, so a long column of "10, 10, 10, 10" does not mean ten people. It means a handful, maybe. Take those floor values out and the whole foreign world drops to a few thousand real searches a month, spread across 182 different ways of saying the same thing.
The phrases an actual outsourcing buyer would type were the emptiest of all. From the US:
- "hire developers in pakistan": about 10 a month
- "outsourcing to pakistan": about 10 a month
- "offshore software development pakistan": close to zero
- "software outsourcing companies in pakistan": close to zero
And 87 of the 182 phrases had zero searches in every one of the 22 countries. Zero. That includes nearly every "ui ux design agency in city" and "software outsourcing company in city" variation. Those pages exist on hundreds of agency websites right now, carefully optimised for something nobody types.
I sat with that for a while.
The second surprise, and this one actually worried me
I pulled the month by month history for the main phrases, for searchers in the United States.
"software companies in pakistan" was at 590 searches a month in September 2025. By August 2026 it was at 20.
Not a typo. Five hundred and ninety, down to twenty. "software house pakistan" went from 390 to 20 over the same twelve months. Across all 182 phrases, comparing the first three months of the window to the last three:
- United States: down 63%
- Canada: down 42%
- Netherlands: down 53%
- Switzerland: down 59%
- United Kingdom: down 12%
- UAE: down 9%
- Pakistan itself: up 6%
- Qatar: up 43%, from a very small base
So foreign interest in "Pakistan" as a search term for software work was not just small. It fell by more than half inside a year. I will come back to where I think it went, because that turned out to be the most interesting part.
Who is actually searching, then?
The 50,000 domestic searches are very real, and they are big:
- "software house lahore" and "software houses in lahore": about 4,400 a month each
- "software house karachi": about 3,600
- "seo companies in lahore": about 3,600
- "software house islamabad": about 2,400
- "digital marketing agencies in pakistan": about 1,600
- "software house pakistan": about 1,300
- "digital marketing agencies in karachi" and "in lahore": about 1,300 each
- "software houses in multan": about 1,000
- "software houses in faisalabad": about 1,000
- "it companies in lahore": about 880
- "software houses in rawalpindi": about 590
- "software companies in pakistan": about 480
- "software houses in peshawar": about 390
Lahore is the centre of gravity, which surprised nobody I told and made a few of them insufferable about it. Then Karachi, then Islamabad. Every other city is small but real from inside Pakistan, and basically zero from anywhere else.
But who are these fifty thousand people? I looked at what else they search alongside the big phrases, and it tells you a lot:
- About one in six to one in eight is openly looking for a job or an internship: "software house jobs in lahore", "software houses in lahore for internship for freshers", "list of software houses in lahore".
- About one in ten is looking for a specific neighbourhood: "software house in johar town", "software houses in gulberg", "software houses in dha lahore". That is someone trying to find an office, not a vendor.
- The rest, still the majority, is list and comparison: "top software houses in lahore", "best it companies in pakistan", or the bare phrase with nothing added.
Google has clearly reached the same conclusion. The top results inside Pakistan for "software houses in lahore" are a "Top 20+ IT Companies in Lahore" listicle, a GitHub repository, a PDF directory somebody uploaded to Scribd, and Glassdoor. Google has decided that query means "give me a list." Not "I want to hire you."
So, being honest: the people searching for Pakistani software houses are computer science students picking an employer, developers reading the market, local businesses that need a website, and, I strongly suspect, a fair number of us checking on each other. That is a real audience and a large one. It is just not the audience any of us had in mind when we wrote "leading software house in Pakistan" on the homepage.
The searches that do exist abroad are not landing on anyone's website anyway
I looked at what a buyer in the United States actually sees when they search "software companies in pakistan" or "best software companies in pakistan".
Positions one, two and three are not websites at all. Every one of the six main phrases had a People Also Ask box. Four of the six had a map pack. Three of the six had an AI Overview. The first real organic result is at position four.
And what is at position four and below? Two directories, GoodFirms and DesignRush. Then a Wikipedia category page. A Kaggle dataset. A GitHub README. A blog post from a training institute. A PDF hosted by a Pakistani embassy in Europe. Crunchbase. The UK and UAE results look almost the same.
Individual agencies do show up, but rarely, and only the two or three that have pushed the exact phrase into their page title.
I also checked what the big agency directories earn from all Pakistan related searches put together. Ten of them, including Clutch, GoodFirms, DesignRush, TechBehemoths and Sortlist. Their combined estimated traffic from every Pakistan related search is roughly 2,600 visits a month. All of them. That is the entire prize. And Clutch, the biggest directory on earth, does not rank for these phrases in the US at all. Its single best Pakistan keyword is "pakistan trucking."
If you have ever paid a directory for a "Top Software Company in Pakistan" badge, read that paragraph one more time.
Where the foreign buyer actually went
This is the part that connected back to those conversations over chai.
The US searches did not fall 63% because Americans stopped wanting to hire from Pakistan. They fell because buyers stopped asking Google.
There are now estimates of how often a question gets asked inside AI assistants, not just typed into a search box. For "it companies in pakistan", from the US:
- Typed into Google: about 40 a month
- Asked in an AI assistant: about 666 a month
Sixteen times more. The question did not die. It moved into ChatGPT and Gemini, where none of our title tags matter at all.
So I asked them myself. With browsing switched on, I asked both assistants three things a real buyer would ask: the best software development companies in Pakistan, the top IT companies in Lahore, and where to find a reliable list of Pakistani software houses to outsource to.
What came back:
- The companies they name are mostly the genuinely large, established ones. Systems Limited, NETSOL, 10Pearls, Arbisoft, Devsinc, Confiz, Tkxel, Contour. Some of them people I have sat across a table from in the last few months. Plus a handful of small agencies whose page titles literally say "best software house in Pakistan," which tells you the assistants are not immune to the old trick either.
- The sources they cite are the P@SHA member directory, PSEB's list of registered companies, then Clutch and GoodFirms, then a few thin listicles.
And when I asked "where can I find a reliable list," both of them pointed first to the two official registers. Not to any agency's website. Not to any top ten blog post. To the public, structured, slightly boring lists that most of us have been ignoring for years.
That was the moment the whole thing clicked for me. The people I have been talking to were right. The services business is changing, and one of the ways it is changing is that the buyer is no longer reading our websites. They are asking a machine that reads registers.
What I took away from all this
I am going to be honest that I went into this expecting a different answer, and I would rather share what I found than what I hoped for.
Four things I now believe, for my own business and for any agency here:
1. "Pakistani software house" is a description, not a keyword. The people who search that phrase are overwhelmingly inside Pakistan and mostly looking for a job, an office, or a list. If your clients are in the US or the Gulf, the phrase your whole site is built around is one they type about ten times a month. Keep being honest about where you are. Just stop expecting those words to bring you buyers on their own.
2. The market foreign buyers actually search in has no country in it. "Mobile app development company" gets about 201,000 searches a month in the US. "Software companies" about 27,000. "ERP software" about 49,500. That is where the buyers are, and in that market you compete on the service, the industry, the outcome and the case study, with Pakistan as the delivery and price advantage on the page rather than the phrase in the title. It is a much harder market. It is also the only one with people in it.
3. If you want the foreign buyer that is left, you have to be citable, not just rankable. The assistants answer from P@SHA, PSEB and structured directories. Being properly registered, and having consistent facts about your company (legal name, founding year, headcount, offices, services) that match everywhere, is now worth more than a "top software house" headline. Structured, verifiable, consistent data is what an AI trusts enough to repeat.
4. The domestic audience is real, and almost nobody is serving it well. Fifty thousand searches a month from inside Pakistan, and the best Google can find for them is a GitHub README and a PDF on Scribd. Somebody is going to build the honest, complete, current version of that list, for the people who are actually searching: students, developers, local businesses and the industry itself. That is a genuine opportunity sitting in plain sight.
One last thing that surprised me
I had always assumed most of our companies skip Google Business Profiles, because so many teams are remote. So I checked that too. In Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad, a search for "software house" returned the maximum the tool would give me, 100 listings per city, and of those:
- 76% to 83% list a website
- 91% list a phone number
- 84% to 98% have a rating, with 25 to 57 reviews each on average
- 95% are categorised as "Software company"
- Every single one I opened had been claimed by its owner
We are far more visible on Google Maps than we are in Google Search. I found that oddly reassuring. The industry is not invisible. It is just optimised for the wrong door.
What I am doing about it
I am changing how I talk about the work. Not what we are, that has not changed, but which words I expect to do the heavy lifting. The country goes in the story, the proof and the price. The keyword goes on the service and the outcome. And I am paying a lot more attention to the plain, structured facts about the company that an AI assistant would want to repeat, because that is where the next client is asking.
To everyone I have been talking to over the last few months: thank you. You told me the ground was shifting and I did not fully believe you until I measured it. You were right.
And if you run an agency anywhere in Pakistan and your homepage still says "Leading Software House in Pakistan," I would gently suggest checking who is actually searching for that. I did. It was not who I thought.
If you want the numbers for your own city or your own service line, message me. I have them, and I am happy to share.