Definition
Search intent is what a person actually wants when they type a search: to learn something, do something, reach a particular website or visit a place. Google's own quality raters sort every search into these four intents, and a search can carry more than one.
Example. A search for a schema markup validator is a Do search: people want a tool to test their code, so validator tools fill most of the top results.
You can sort your own search queries by intent, and find the pages fighting their queries, with the free Search Intent Mapper skill.
What are the types of search intent?
The types of search intent Google's raters use are Know, Do, Website and Visit-in-person. They come from Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines. SEO tools use their own four labels, which line up roughly.
| Google's rater guidelines | What the searcher wants | Closest SEO tool label |
|---|---|---|
| Know | Information | Informational |
| Do | To accomplish a goal, such as buying, downloading or using a tool | Transactional or commercial |
| Website | A specific website or page | Navigational |
| Visit-in-person | A business or place nearby | Usually transactional, with a location |
Can you trust an SEO tool's intent label?
An SEO tool's intent label is a guess, and on the searches we checked it was often missing or wrong. On 8 November 2026 we took the 50 searches that send hawkacademy.co the most non-branded clicks, pulled DataForSEO's intent label for each, and read the live Google results.
| What we found | Searches |
|---|---|
| No intent label at all | 17 of 50 |
| Label contradicted by the results we read, including the examples below | At least 5 of the 33 labelled |
| Search | Tool label | What the top results were |
|---|---|---|
| ai crawler checker | Navigational | Four different checker tools from four different sites |
| schema markup generator | Informational | Generator tools |
| claude seo skill | Navigational | Articles, a Reddit thread and skill tools from many different sites |
The "contradicted" count is our own reading of the results. Either way, search the query, look at what ranks, and build the kind of page that is already winning.
Can one search have more than one intent?
One search can have more than one intent, and Google's raters are told to expect it. Search the word SERP and the results mix pages about search engine results pages with pages about a Supplemental Executive Retirement Plan. When intents split like that, the page has to win the meaning most searchers want, or name the meaning it serves in its first line.
Sources
Last checked against these sources on 8 November 2026.