Hey Rita,

Totally fair question. “Intent clustering” sounds more technical than it really is. My understanding is, it just means grouping keywords that reflect the same search goal.

For example, if people search “how to make compost at home,” “DIY composting for beginners,” and “best way to compost kitchen scraps,” they all want the same thing: to learn how to compost. That’s one intent cluster.

It helps you plan content more strategically. Instead of writing three separate posts, you can create one strong guide that covers the main topic well. Google usually rewards that approach because it matches how people search and avoids overlap.

When people talk about “checking SERP overlap,” it just means comparing the search results for two keywords. If most of the same pages show up for both, Google sees them as the same intent. Some SEO tools automate that, but you can do a quick version manually too (GPT can help a lot here).

You’re right though, the new Query Groups feature basically tries to do this for us automatically.

I hope that's helped clear the brain fog a bit.

- Sarah 💚

That’s a great breakdown Sarah -some awesome responses on this thread 🙂

Rita, to give you a real world example, on one of my ecommerce sites I sell kitchen gear. I used to target keywords like “best coffee grinder,” “coffee grinder for home,” and “manual coffee grinder reviews” with separate posts. When I checked Google, the same competitors showed up for all three, which told me they were being seen as having the same intent.

Now I just have one solid page that covers all of those angles. It actually ranks better and saves me from trying to manage three similar posts. That’s intent clustering in action and I was also thinking another reason Google may favor this approach is it's less bandwidth from their side to spider/index/rank one page as opposed to three!

If Query Groups ever gets good at spotting that pattern automatically, it’ll be a big help for planning new content.