Keyword Density Checker

What This Measures

Paste text or point the tool at a URL and it returns each term with a raw count and a percentage of total words, for single words and for two and three word phrases. Common stop words are excluded so the list is not dominated by "the" and "and".

TERM                        COUNT   DENSITY
email deliverability           14      1.13%
deliverability                 21      1.69%
spam folder                     9      0.73%
authentication                 11      0.89%
dmarc                           8      0.65%
sender reputation               5      0.40%

What that table is useful for is not the percentages. It is the shape of the list. A page about email deliverability that mentions authentication, DMARC, and sender reputation is covering the subject. A page where the top terms are the brand name and a call to action is not about anything, and no amount of adjusting density fixes that.

Density Is a Symptom, Not a Target

The idea that a specific percentage helps a page rank comes from an era when search engines counted words. They stopped. Modern ranking systems evaluate whether a page covers a topic, using relationships between concepts rather than repetition of a string, which is why writing to hit a percentage produces text that reads badly and ranks no better.

There is one direction in which the number still carries information. Very high density, roughly above four or five percent for a single term in ordinary prose, usually means the text was written for a machine. That reads as spam to a human, and human behaviour is measurable. The failure is not the percentage, it is the writing the percentage reveals.

The useful way to read the output is as a coverage check on a draft. If a term you expected is missing, the draft has a gap. If a term you did not expect is dominating, the draft has drifted. Both are editorial findings, and neither is fixed by inserting the keyword four more times.

A Better Question Than Density

Instead of asking how often a term appears, ask whether the page answers the question someone typed. That is closer to what ranking systems and AI engines are both evaluating, and it is measurable in ways density is not. The readability test checks whether the text is comprehensible at the level your audience reads, and the AI Citability Scorer checks whether a page is structured clearly enough for an answer engine to quote it correctly.

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