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Surfilby Adam Hafez
Free tool

Keyword density checker with word count

Keyword density checker: count words and whole-phrase keyword matches in your draft, then see density as a percentage. Free, runs in your browser.

Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is uploaded, logged or stored.

This is a diagnostic number, not an optimization target. Google has stated it does not use keyword density as a ranking signal; see the sourced explanation below the tool.

Key takeaways

  • There is no official optimal keyword density percentage, and Google's spam policies give no numeric threshold for keyword stuffing.
  • Google's SEO starter guide says excessively repeating the same words, even in variations, is tiring for users and against its spam policies.
  • Density here is keyword occurrences times the number of words in the phrase, divided by total word count.
  • Google says content length alone does not matter for ranking and that there is no magical word count target.
  • The in-tool warning at six or more occurrences is this tool's own heuristic, not a published Google rule.

What it takes

  • Body content to analyze
  • A target keyword or phrase

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How to use it

  1. 1Paste your draftUse the body content textarea for the full text you are checking, not just a summary.
  2. 2Enter the target keyword or phraseMulti-word phrases are matched as a whole phrase, case-insensitively, not as separate words.
  3. 3Read the countsThe tool shows total word count, how many times the phrase occurs, and the resulting density percentage, updated as you type.
  4. 4Treat the density number as a sanity checkA very high count is a sign to vary your phrasing, not a signal that a lower number will rank better.

Word count and keyword repetition are easy to measure and easy to misuse. This checker measures both plainly, so you can confirm a draft has not repeated a term far more than a human writer would, without turning the number into a target.

What the checker calculates

It shows three numbers, updated as you type:

  • Total words. The text split on whitespace. Punctuation stays attached, so “Google’s” and “report,” each count as one word.
  • Keyword occurrences. Whole-word, case-insensitive matches of the exact keyword or phrase. “AI Overviews” matches “ai overviews” but not “AI Overview”, and a phrase is only counted when its words appear in that order.
  • Keyword density. Occurrences times the number of words in the phrase, divided by total words, as a percentage to two decimals. Multiplying by phrase length means density measures the share of the text the phrase takes up, so a two-word phrase counts twice as heavily as a one-word keyword with the same number of matches.

When the phrase occurs 6 or more times, a warning appears. That trigger is the tool’s own heuristic, and the warning says so. It does not scale with length, so it fires just as readily on a long guide as on a short post.

Why no density is ideal

Density targets, most often somewhere between 1 and 3 percent, have circulated in SEO for years. Google has not published one. Its spam policies define keyword stuffing as “filling a web page with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate rankings”, with examples such as blocks of city names and words repeated unnaturally or out of context. There is no percentage in that policy. The SEO starter guide is just as plain: “Excessively repeating the same words over and over (even in variations) is tiring for users, and keyword stuffing is against Google’s spam policies.”

So a low density is not a problem to fix, and a high one is only a problem if the text reads unnaturally.

How to read the results

Use density as a proofreading signal. A draft revised several times around one keyword can drift into repeating it far more than a person would write it. If the count looks high for the length of the piece, read the passages that use the phrase aloud. If they read mechanically, swap in pronouns, synonyms or a more specific term. If they read naturally, leave them, whatever the percentage says.

Word count works the same way. Google’s starter guide says content length alone does not matter for ranking, and that “there’s no magical word count target, minimum or maximum”. Treat the total as a planning number, not a score.

Worked example

The checker opens with a 72-word paragraph about Search Console reporting impressions from AI features, with “AI Overviews” as the keyword. It finds 2 occurrences, so density is (2 x 2) / 72 = 5.56%. No warning appears, since 2 is below 6.

Change the keyword to “AI” and the tool finds 4 matches (AI features, AI Overviews twice, AI Mode). Density is (4 x 1) / 72, also 5.56%. Change it to “filter” and it finds 1, because the second mention is the plural “filters”, which a whole-word match does not count.

Common mistakes it catches

  • A keyword forced into every sentence after a keyword-focused edit, which the occurrence count makes visible.
  • Lists of place names or variants added to capture more searches, the pattern Google’s policy uses as an example of keyword stuffing.
  • Chasing a percentage by padding copy with the phrase. The density number here is a diagnostic, and Google publishes no target for it.

Sources

  1. 1.Spam policies for Google Search: keyword stuffing - Google Search CentralPrimary
  2. 2.SEO starter guide - Google Search CentralPrimary

Common questions

What is the ideal keyword density?

There is none. Google's spam policies describe keyword stuffing in terms of keywords repeated unnaturally or out of context, with no percentage attached, and its SEO starter guide calls excessive repetition tiring for users. The 1 to 3 percent ranges quoted around the web have no Google source.

How is keyword density calculated here?

Occurrences of the phrase, times the number of words in the phrase, divided by the total word count, times 100. A two-word phrase found twice in 72 words gives (2 x 2) / 72 = 5.56%. Words are counted by splitting on whitespace, so "Google's" is one word.

Why does the tool warn me at a specific number?

The warning appears when the phrase occurs 6 or more times, whatever the length of the text. That is this tool's own heuristic for catching accidental over-repetition, labeled as such in the warning, not a Google-published rule. In a long article 6 uses can be perfectly natural.

Does matching count a phrase inside another word?

No. Matching uses word boundaries, so "cat" does not match inside "category", and "filter" does not match "filters". Matching ignores case. A multi-word phrase must appear as that exact sequence of words to count as one occurrence.

Is there a minimum word count for SEO?

No. Google's SEO starter guide says the length of content alone does not matter for ranking: "there's no magical word count target, minimum or maximum." The word count here is for your own planning, not a ranking threshold.