WordStream's free keyword tool: it returns advertising metrics, so it answers what a keyword costs to buy rather than how hard it is to rank for

WordStream's Free Keyword Tool takes a seed phrase or a URL and returns keyword ideas with a Google search volume, a competition reading, a cost per click and WordStream's own opportunity score, with filters for industry and location. Three of those four columns are advertising numbers, which is the most useful thing to know before you use it. The tool is answering what it would cost to buy traffic for a keyword. Somebody planning organic pages needs that answer too, as a commercial signal, and needs a second tool for the separate question of how contested the organic results are. Read on the tool's own pages on 20 October 2026, with the figures worth rechecking before you rely on them, since free tools change their limits more often than their marketing.

What it gives you, and the decision each column supports

Column	What it measures	The decision it supports
Keyword	The suggested phrase, expanded from your seed or from a page you supply	Which phrasings real searchers use, including the ones you would not have written
Google search volume	Average monthly searches on Google for that phrase	Ranking topics by size, so effort goes at demand rather than at interest
Competition	How contested the phrase is among advertisers	Whether a paid auction for this phrase is crowded
Cost per click	The typical price advertisers pay for a click on that phrase	What buying this traffic costs, and therefore what the phrase is worth commercially
Opportunity score	WordStream's own composite reading across the other columns	A first sort of a long list, before you apply your own judgement

WordStream's own pages for the tool describe filtering results by industry and location, entering a URL to pull keyword data for that page, seeing the first 25 keywords with their figures immediately, and downloading the full list as a CSV. Read what the download step asks for before you enter anything, because that is the step vendors most often change.

Why the competition and cost columns are auction readings

This is the part that sends people wrong, and it is a difference in what the words mean rather than a fault in the tool.

• Cost per click is a bid price. It describes what advertisers have been paying to appear in the paid slots. It says nothing about the organic results below them, and it is an average across many advertisers, match types, locations and quality scores, so your own cost would differ.
• Competition is advertiser density. A high reading means many advertisers want the phrase. Organic difficulty is a different measurement built from the strength of the pages currently ranking, and the two readings disagree regularly. Plenty of phrases are expensive to buy and straightforward to rank for, and the reverse happens too.
• The opportunity score is the vendor's own formula. Composite scores are useful for sorting a long list into an order and are not comparable with any other tool's score, because nobody publishes the weighting.

There is a genuinely valuable organic use for the cost column, and it is the opposite of ignoring it. A high cost per click is the market telling you that a click on that phrase converts into money. Advertisers do not keep paying for clicks that produce nothing. So when two phrases have similar volume and one carries a cost per click several times the other, the expensive one is usually the better page to write first, whatever your organic plan says about difficulty.

The three jobs this tool is fastest for

• Sizing paid demand before you commit a budget. Volume plus cost per click, multiplied by a click through rate you are willing to assume, gives you a rough monthly cost to be present on a phrase. Do that arithmetic with your own conversion rate and average order value rather than a published benchmark, because the answer is specific to your business.
• Finding the commercial phrasings. Because the expansions come from advertising data, the list leans toward phrases people use when they intend to buy, which is a different flavour of list from one built for informational coverage.
• Sanity checking a figure from somewhere else. A second reading of a volume you got from another source tells you whether a number is roughly right. When two tools disagree sharply, the phrase is usually seasonal or very low volume, and either way it is a signal to look closer.

A five minute run, in order

• Enter one seed phrase a customer would actually type, or the URL of your most commercially important page.
• Set the location to the market you sell in and the industry to yours, since both filters change the list materially.
• Read the first rows for phrasing rather than for numbers. The vocabulary is often the most valuable output.
• Export the list, then sort it by cost per click rather than by volume, which surfaces the commercially valuable phrases rather than the popular ones.
• Take the survivors into a proper process, because a keyword list is an input and not a plan. The sequence that turns one into decisions is in keyword research, a repeatable method in five steps.

For the organic half of the question, Google's own planner plus the free sources that cover what it leaves out are set out in Keyword Planner free, how to use it without running ads. Search Console is the one free source that reports your own real queries, which no third party tool can produce for you.

Why the screenshots you find do not match

WordStream's own About page describes the business as WordStream by LocaliQ, part of the USA TODAY NETWORK. Older articles and tutorials were written when WordStream was a standalone company with a paid product alongside the free tools, so screenshots, menu names and the surrounding product set differ by the year the article was written. If a walkthrough does not match what you see, check its date before concluding the tool changed under you.

WordStream's keyword tool: the questions worth settling first

Is the WordStream keyword tool actually free?

The keyword tool is offered free alongside WordStream's other free graders. The pattern with free tools of this kind is that the on screen rows are immediate and the full export is the step that asks for a detail or two, so read that step on the live tool rather than taking a figure from an article.

How accurate are its search volumes?

Treat them as directional and compare across phrases rather than trusting a single figure. Volume estimates everywhere are modelled, and the useful question is whether phrase A is bigger than phrase B, which these answer well. For an exact figure on a phrase that a budget depends on, Google's own data inside an active advertising account is the closer source.

Can I use it for SEO?

Yes, for the demand and phrasing half of the work, and read the cost per click as a commercial priority signal rather than as a difficulty score. Pair it with a reading of the actual results page for each phrase you shortlist, because the pages currently ranking are the only honest statement of what it takes to rank.

How does it compare with Google Keyword Planner?

Both draw on Google advertising data. The planner gives you Google's own banded ranges inside an advertising account and connects to campaign building. WordStream's tool gives you a list and an export without an advertising account, with industry and location filters applied for you, which makes it quicker for a first pass.

What does the opportunity score mean?

It is WordStream's composite of the other columns, intended to put a long list in a sensible order. Use it to sort, then apply your own filter: does this phrase describe something you sell, and would the person typing it be ready to act.

Does it cover Bing or only Google?

The volume column is described as Google search volume. Some third party guides report Bing figures too, and the tool's own pages are the place to confirm what is currently included, since the data sources behind free tools are revised without announcement.

The query volume that no keyword tool reports

Every tool on this subject counts searches typed into a search engine. A growing share of buying questions are now typed into an assistant instead, as a sentence: who is the best option for this, which of these two should I use, who do you recommend. Those have no volume column anywhere, because no advertising auction exists for them, and the answer is assembled from what has been published about each company rather than from a results page you can inspect. The practical move is to read the answer your own category returns, with your name left out of the question. AI Knows Us asks those buying questions across the main assistants and records who gets named and what the answers were built from.