Keyword Intent Classifier
Paste a keyword list and get each one sorted into informational, commercial, transactional or navigational — with the signal that decided it and how confident that call is.
Nothing you type here is uploaded, stored or sent anywhere. It all runs in your browser.
Four intents, four page types
Intent is the reason behind the search, and it decides what kind of page can rank. Pointing a service page at "how to build backlinks" does not rank badly because the page is bad — it does not rank because nobody searching that wants a service page, so nobody clicks it and Google has ten guides that answer the question properly.
- Informational. Someone wants to understand something. "What is a backlink", "how to build backlinks". The page is a guide, an explainer or an FAQ. Selling on it early is the fastest way to lose the ranking.
- Commercial investigation. Someone has decided to buy and is working out from whom. "Best link building services", "Ahrefs vs Semrush", "link building agency reviews". The page is a comparison, a listicle or an honest buyer's guide. This is the highest-value content most sites never write.
- Transactional. Someone is ready. "Buy guest posts", "link building pricing", "digital pr agency near me". The page is the product, service or pricing page.
- Navigational. Someone wants a specific site. "Ahrefs login". If it is not your brand, there is nothing to build — you will not outrank a company for its own name, and you should not spend a morning trying.
How each call is made
These are rules, not a model. Each keyword is tokenised and checked against four ordered lists of modifiers, and the first match wins. The order is the interesting part, because most of the hard cases are queries that match two lists at once.
Brand terms come first: a branded query is navigational however it is phrased. Then a question form beats a price word, which is why "how much does link building cost" is classed commercial investigation and not transactional — that search is someone deciding, not someone buying. Then transactional modifiers beat commercial ones, so "buy the best guest posts" lands on transactional. Provider nouns — agency, company, services, freelancer — are checked dead last, after every real modifier, because "link building agency" wants a service page while "best link building agency" wants a comparison, and the modifier has to win that argument. What is left falls back on shape: five words or more usually means a question being typed out longhand, and a plural head noun with no other signal usually means browsing.
The confidence figure is how much that matched signal is worth, not a probability. Anything at or below 0.5 got there by a fallback rule rather than a real modifier, and those are the ones to read yourself. Turn on the filter to see only those.
Where rules like these get it wrong
Two situations, consistently. The first is a bare head term — "link building", "backlinks" — where there is no signal at all and the honest answer is that the SERP is mixed. Look at the actual results for those; Google's blend of page types is the answer. The second is industry vocabulary that means something different in your niche, where a word on one of these lists is ordinary language for your customers. Add those to the brand box or read past them.
Once the intents are right, group the keywords into pages with the keyword clustering tool — it uses the same intent rules to split clusters that would otherwise put a guide and a pricing page on one URL.
Questions people ask
Why is a "vs" keyword commercial and not informational?
Because someone comparing two named products has already decided to buy one of them. The page that ranks for it is a comparison, and it converts far better than a guide does. Treating comparison keywords as informational, and answering them with a neutral explainer, is one of the commonest ways to waste a good keyword.
Should every keyword get its own page?
No. Intent tells you what kind of page; clustering tells you how many. Fifteen keywords with the same intent and overlapping vocabulary are one page, not fifteen. Run the list through the clustering tool after this.
What do I do with navigational keywords for other people’s brands?
Usually nothing. You will not outrank a company for its own name, and traffic from people looking for a competitor’s login page is worth very little. The exception is a genuine comparison or alternatives page, which is commercial intent wearing a navigational keyword, and which can rank.
How accurate is a rule-based classifier?
On keywords carrying an obvious modifier, close to right. On bare head terms with no modifier at all, it is a coin toss dressed up with a confidence score — which is why those are reported at 0.3 and flagged. The only authoritative answer is the live SERP: whatever page type is already ranking is the page type Google thinks matches.
Does it send my keyword list anywhere?
No. The rules, the lists and the classification all run in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, logged or stored, which is not something you can say about most keyword tools that ask for a list this size.
Related tools
The right page type still has to outrank someone
Matching intent gets you eligible. Getting picked over the eight pages that also match is what links are for.