Foundational SEO
Search intent
The goal behind a query: what the searcher is actually trying to accomplish, classified as informational, navigational, commercial, or transactional.
By Shimon Carroll, Founder, SEO for AI Agents · Last updated
Search intent is the why behind a query. Two queries with similar wording can have opposite intents, and the page that satisfies one will fail the other. The classic taxonomy is four types: informational (learn something), navigational (reach a specific site), commercial investigation (compare options before buying), and transactional (act, buy, sign up). A comparative or "best X for Y" intent sits between commercial and transactional and is increasingly its own category.
Intent is not something you assign; it is something you read off the live results. The pages Google already ranks for a query reveal what it has judged the intent to be. If the first page is all listicles, the intent is comparison; if it is all product pages, the intent is transactional; if it is all definitions, the intent is informational. Trying to rank a product page for a query Google treats as informational is a losing fight.
For the AI surfaces, intent matters even more because answer engines synthesize the type of answer the question implies. A how-to question gets steps; a comparison gets a table; a definition gets a passage. Matching the form of your content to the intent, and to the form the engine wants to compose, is what makes a page both rank and get cited. We classify the intent of target queries from the live SERP feature mix.