Skip to main content
All CollectionsSite ExplorerTerminology
What are organic keywords?
What are organic keywords?
Rebekah avatar
Written by Rebekah
Updated this week

An organic keyword is the search query entered in, where a target website shows up in the search results.

In the above example, https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker has a organic keyword "backlink checker".

The fastest way to check this for any target website or URL is via Site Explorer > Overview, which shows the total number of keywords that the target website ranks for in the top 100 positions of google SERPs:

Reports that support SERP overview allow you to check the actual SERP for the organic keyword where the target website was found to rank:

Tips about how total organic keywords are calculated

Same keyword but different location still counts as one keyword

If the target website ranks for the same keyword across multiple locations in “All locations” mode, it is still counted as only one keyword.

Both normal and SERP feature rankings count as Organic Keywords

By default, both rankings in normal Organic results as well as SERP features are counted.

You may rank for more keywords than Ahrefs shows

The number of organic keywords in our reports is almost always smaller than the actual number of keywords your website is ranking for. This is because our database is extensive, but does not include all possible keywords searched in Google, and thus may not contain certain keywords that your target website ranks for.

The number of Organic Keywords shown depends on what frequency you select

Here is how the calculation of organic keywords work on different frequencies:

  • Daily - sums up all organic keywords that the website ranks for on that day only (UTC 00:00)

  • Weekly - sums up all organic keywords that the website ranks for from Monday to Sunday of that week.

  • Monthly - sums up all organic keywords that the website ranks for from first to last day of that month

This means for example:

  • You selected the Monthly frequency

  • You want to look at the number of organic keywords in March

  • Today is the 1st of March

Then, only keywords that your website ranks for on the 1st of March will be counted for March's number. Whereas February will count all keywords that your website is found to be ranking for between 1st - 28th of February.


Ahrefs updates its keyword database with newly-discovered search queries a few times each month. During this time, new keywords will be added, and unpopular keywords will be removed. Announcements about keyword database updates can be found in our Product blog.

There are many tools we provide about this data that can help you analyze organic keywords, and we'd recommend you to check out our Academy for more information about how to use them.


Watch a tutorial

Did this answer your question?