Keyword density checker: see what your page is actually about.
Term and phrase frequency for any text. There is no correct density number — but there is a page that never names its own subject, and a page that names it forty times.
By Mike Cecconello · Updated September 4, 2026
Keyword density checker
Runs in your browser. Nothing you paste is sent anywhere.
There is no correct density figure and there has not been for years. Use this to catch the opposite problem: a page that never states its own subject, or one that repeats it so often it reads as spam.
What you can do with it
- Check whether a page states its own subject at all
- Catch keyword stuffing in content you inherited or outsourced
- Find the phrase a competitor's page is genuinely built around
- Spot two pages of yours converging on the same term
How it works, step by step
- 1
Start with two- and three-word phrases
Single words are mostly noise. Search demand lives in phrases, and so does meaning: 'content' tells you nothing, while 'content brief template' tells you what the page is for.
- 2
Ask whether the subject appears at all
The most common real problem is the opposite of stuffing. A page written to sound sophisticated can circle its topic without ever stating it plainly, which leaves both a reader and a model unsure what the page answers.
- 3
Look for the unintended winner
If the most repeated phrase is not what the page is about, that is a signal. It usually means the page drifted, or that a boilerplate block is outweighing the body.
- 4
Compare against a page that ranks
Run the same check on a top result. You are not copying a density figure; you are seeing which phrases a page that already works treats as central.
- 5
Fix by adding clarity, not repetitions
If the term is missing, put it in the opening sentence, one heading and the title, then stop. Inserting it another twelve times is the move that gets a page filtered rather than ranked.
The number nobody should be optimising
Keyword density is the most durable bad metric in SEO. It made sense when ranking was closer to term counting, and it has survived for two decades because it is easy to compute and produces a satisfying-looking percentage.
The percentage means very little. What the underlying data shows is genuinely useful, which is why this tool reports counts and phrases rather than a verdict against some ideal figure.
The two failures it does catch
A page that never says what it is about. This is far more common than stuffing, especially in copy written to sound impressive. The subject is implied by the surrounding design, the nav, the brand — everything except the text. Run the check and the top phrases are generic verbs. A reader figures it out from context; a model extracting a passage has nothing specific to lift.
A page that says it too often. Usually inherited content, or work from a supplier paid by the word against a density brief. It is obvious once you see the same phrase at 4% of a 1,200-word page, and it reads exactly as badly as it measures.
How to read the output
Look at the two- and three-word phrases first, and ask one question: if you only saw this list, would you know what the page is for? That is close to the question a search engine and an assistant are both answering, and it is a better test than any percentage.
If a phrase is missing, the fix is one mention in the title, one in the opening sentence, one in a heading. If a phrase is overwhelming, the fix is to delete instances rather than add synonyms around them.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good keyword density?
There is not one, and any tool quoting a target percentage is selling a 2009 idea. Google has used semantic understanding rather than term counting for well over a decade. The useful reading is qualitative: does the page state its subject clearly, and does it repeat it so often that a human would notice?
Can keyword stuffing still hurt a page?
Yes. It is explicitly listed in Google's spam policies, and the practical harm arrives sooner than a penalty: the page reads badly, so people leave, and a model extracting a passage finds repetitive text rather than a clean answer. The risk is not a mysterious algorithmic hit, it is that stuffed text is worse text.
Should I use the exact keyword or variations?
Both, naturally. Use the exact phrase where it reads naturally — the title, the opening, one heading — and variations everywhere else. Search engines resolve synonyms and related concepts, so forcing one string repeatedly buys nothing and costs readability.
Why does this tool ignore common words?
Because 'the' appearing 6% of the time is a fact about English, not about your page. The filter is optional: turn it off and you can see the true distribution, which is occasionally useful for spotting a template block that is duplicating across a site.
Does density matter for AI search?
Less than for classic SEO, and in a different way. What matters is whether a passage can be extracted and attributed. A clear sentence naming the subject once is more citable than a paragraph repeating it, because the assistant needs a quotable claim rather than a keyword-rich block.
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