Where is the data coming from and how does it work?
The data in the Search Term Discovery tool is supplied by a third-party provider, DataForSEO.
This data comes from two of their databases - one for SERP data and another for search term data including search volume.
As this data is from a third-party source, we are unable to refresh this data.
Position data in Search Term Discovery may vary from that in Pi for the same search terms because the data comes from different sources.
Position data in Pi is our own data, which is accurate and up to date.
Search Term Discovery shows an estimated position based on data from DataForSEO.
How is quota usage calculated in Search Term Discovery?
Accounts have a monthly limit. This depletes each time a query is made and refreshes at the start of the month.
The quota is used when submitting the form. Subsequent sorting/filtering of the same dataset will not use any extra quota.
The quota used is roughly proportional to the number of results returned. However, several factors affect this:
There is an overhead to each request that requires some additional quota. This will seem more significant where a small number of results is returned.
There may be several attempts to reach the 'target number of search terms' and each of these attempts will use a varying amount of quota. Therefore, if setting a large target but receiving a small number of results, you may see a larger discrepancy.
How is the result generated?
Ideas
The selected maximum of terms to return is a target number.
DataForSEO will return search terms based on the Google Ad categories associated with the seed terms.
We always ask for the highest search volume search terms from the result, unless a range of search volume is specified in the parameters.
When multiple seed terms are used, the limit is distributed across all of them to provide equal results from all the seed terms rather than some.
Sometimes the SERP feature columns are empty, that is because DataForSEO hasn’t scraped that search term, therefore, there is no SERP feature data to present.