Keyword watches vs. AI intent: what actually finds leads
Jul 14, 2026 6 min read
Keyword alerts are precise and blind. Intent scoring is fuzzy and thorough. The right setup uses both, in a specific order.
People treat this like a religious question and then lose leads in two entirely different ways. The keyword camp misses everyone who described the outcome instead of naming the service — the person who wrote 'our checkout is losing people at the payment step' never typed 'CRO consultant' and never will. The pure-intent camp gets a beautifully scored feed of people desperate to hire someone to do a thing they do not do. Both camps are confident. Both are leaving money in the group.
Use keywords as a filter, not a trigger
Let intent scoring decide what is a lead. Let your keywords decide whether it is your lead. A post scoring 94 about kitchen cabinets is worthless to a Webflow developer, and no amount of model quality changes that.
A working configuration
Threshold at 80. Keywords set to the problems you solve, not your job title. Alerts on for anything that clears both. Everything else stays in the feed for when you go looking.
Side by side
| Keyword watches | Intent scoring | |
|---|---|---|
| Catches paraphrases | No | Yes |
| False positives | Low | Moderate |
| Setup effort | Ongoing list maintenance | One threshold |
| Misses | Anyone who described your service | Off-topic high-intent posts |
| Best used as | A relevance filter | The trigger |
Run them in this order
Let intent scoring decide whether a post is a lead at all. Let your keywords decide whether it is your lead. Reversing that order is what produces the two classic failures: a feed full of enthusiastic posts about work you do not do, or silence while your buyers describe your service in words you never thought to add to a list.
The exclusion list nobody builds
Everyone spends their first fortnight adding terms. Almost nobody adds exclusions, and exclusions produce the bigger improvement. 'Looking for a job', 'looking for advice', 'looking for a template', 'looking for someone to do this for free', 'looking for feedback' — all share the opening verb of your best lead and convert at roughly zero. Ten minutes writing those down will do more for your signal-to-noise than a month of adding synonyms.
A configuration that survives contact with a real week
Threshold at 80. Keywords set to the problems you solve, not your job title — 'checkout abandonment' rather than 'CRO'. Exclusions for job-hunting, freebie-hunting and student questions. Alerts on only for posts clearing both the score and the topic filter; everything else stays in the feed for when you go looking on a quiet Thursday. That setup produces a handful of alerts a day, which is roughly the number a human will still open in month three.
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