The keyword picker chooses which keywords a site tracks, every week and whenever you press Pick keywords now. It starts from the site’s Search Console queries over the last 90 days. A site without Search Console uses its latest live check readings instead. Brand terms (words from the site’s name and domain) and junk (very short queries, numbers, queries over 8 words) are left out, and so is anything on the never-pick list.
Each candidate gets its monthly searches and cost per click from Google’s keyword planner data and its search intent from an intent model. This costs one research credit per 100 candidates filled. No stored ranking database is read.
Money tier: queries with commercial or transactional intent, scored by impressions times cost per click. The top 50 (Settings sets the count) are tracked and tagged Money. Informational tier: queries with informational intent, by monthly searches, the top 50 tagged Informational.
Keywords you added by hand, and client picks, are never changed. The picks fill what is left of the plan’s tracked keyword limit after those, and the screen says how much room there is. A pick that drops out of the set is paused: it is not checked, but its history stays and it comes back if it is picked again. Untrack a pick and it goes on the never-pick list, so the picker never chooses it again; Undo takes it off the list.
Picks feed Content Ideas: a money pick with no page of the site in the top 20 becomes a page idea, an informational pick with no page becomes a post idea. Each idea names the Power Hub it belongs in and whether that hub is short of clusters.
