Amazon Top Search Terms Report: How to Use It for Keyword Research

Amazon’s Top Search Terms report ranks the searches made across an Amazon store by how often shoppers made them, and names the three products shoppers clicked most for each term, with each product’s share of the term’s clicks and conversions. It is the only Search Analytics dashboard that isn’t limited to your own products, which makes it the one to use for market-wide keyword research.

What the Top Search Terms report shows

Amazon’s Brand Analytics page describes it as “a broad view of customer search activity across Amazon stores”, listing the keywords shoppers use “along with the top three products, categories, and brands associated with each keyword”. Its Brand Analytics guide (8 October 2025) lists what you see for each term:

• the search frequency rank;
• the top-clicked brands and categories;
• the titles of the three most-clicked products, each with its click share and conversion share.

You can filter by ASIN, brand name, product category or keyword. Amazon’s Brand Analytics best practice guide (last updated 8 August 2023) adds that you can look up a term to see which products shoppers click after searching it, or one of your ASINs to see which terms drive clicks to it, and that the report downloads in several formats.

Three details come from Amazon’s API documentation and its definition of the report, where it is still called the Amazon Search Terms report:

• Periods: daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly, one period per request, with weeks running Sunday to Saturday.
• Departments: each row belongs to a search department, such as all of Amazon.com or Beauty, and the rank is calculated within that department.
• Size: the API version is limited to approximately 12 million items, which Amazon describes as “lists of the most popular ASINs categorized by search term and department”.

The report is older than the other two Search Analytics dashboards. Amazon’s October 2021 press release said it had offered brands “a Search Terms report that includes search frequency rank, click data, and conversion share” for several years. You need the same access as for the rest of Brand Analytics; our Amazon Brand Analytics Search Analytics guide covers it.

How to read search frequency rank

Amazon defines search frequency rank as “the numeric rank of a specific search term’s popularity when compared to all other search terms during a given time period”. In practice:

• Smaller means more searches. Rank 1 is the most-searched term in the period; a term ranked 50,000 was searched less often than every term above it.
• It is a rank, not a count. The report doesn’t say how many searches separate one rank from another, so ranks can’t be turned into volumes or added together.
• It depends on the period and department. Ranks are calculated per period and per department, so a term’s weekly and monthly ranks can differ, and so can its rank within a department and across all departments.
• The movement is the useful part. A term climbing week after week is growing. Amazon’s 2023 guide suggests watching for seasonal trends and upcoming holidays to time listing changes, ad keywords and inventory.

For an actual search count, use Search Query Performance, which gives Amazon’s own search query volume for searches tied to your products. For other terms, keyword tools publish estimates; Helium 10’s help center, for example, says its search volumes come from its own models.

Click share and conversion share, with Amazon’s example

Amazon’s definition of the report explains both:

• Click share is the fraction of all clicks on the term, in that department and period, that went to the product.
• Conversion share is the fraction of all conversions from the term that the product achieved. Amazon’s example: “if overall conversions for searchTerm=batteries was 98, and the conversions for clickedAsin were 13, conversionShare would be 13/98=0.1327”, or about 13.3%.

Three ways to read them together:

1. Add up the three click shares. The total is the part of the term’s clicks that goes to the top three products. A high total means a few listings dominate the term; a low one means clicks are spread out.
2. Compare each product’s conversion share with its click share. A conversion share above the click share means the product turns clicks into sales better than the average product on that term. A lower one means it gets clicks it doesn’t convert.
3. Watch the top three over time. Amazon’s 2023 guide asks whether there is “any turnover on these rankings”. A term where the same three products hold their places for months is harder to break into than one where they keep changing.

A keyword research workflow with Top Search Terms

1. Start from your main keyword. Look it up with the keyword filter to see its rank, then do the same for the close variants you want to compare.
2. Shortlist the relevant terms with the best (smallest) ranks.
3. Check who wins each one. Look at the top three products, brands and categories. Is the term in your category, and how concentrated are its clicks?
4. Note the brands. The brands that keep appearing on your shortlist are your real competitors in search. Amazon’s 2023 guide also suggests checking which brands show up on searches for your own brand name.
5. Look up your own ASINs to see the terms where you already make the top three.
6. Move to Search Query Performance for the terms tied to your products, to get search counts and your share at each stage of the funnel.
7. Re-check regularly. Weekly or monthly checks catch seasonal terms as they start to climb.

What Top Search Terms doesn’t show

• Search counts. It gives ranks only.
• Anything below the three most-clicked products for a term.
• Impressions, cart adds or your own funnel. Those are in Search Query Performance and Search Catalog Performance.
• Ad costs or bids.
• More than one store at a time.

Top Search Terms vs the other two dashboards

When a paid keyword tool helps

Top Search Terms is Amazon’s own data, but it stops at a rank and three products per term. Paid tools fill three gaps: estimated search volumes, longer keyword lists for a competitor’s product than its top-three clicks reveal, and history in one view.

Helium 10 shows this report’s data in two of its tools:

• Cerebro, its keyword research tool, has an Amazon Brand Analytics column with each keyword’s search frequency rank and its top three products’ click and conversion shares, plus a graph over time. Helium 10’s help center (6 April 2026) says the data is “received directly from Amazon” and is available on Platinum, Diamond and Enterprise. Helium 10 Platinum costs $99 a month billed yearly or $129 monthly (checked 10 October 2026).
• Black Box, its product research tool, has an Amazon Brand Analytics search that takes your own or a competitor’s ASIN and returns the keywords where it is among the three most-clicked products. It adds Helium 10’s own search-volume trends, title density and sales estimates, and keeps the top three for each period, so you can see who is gaining or losing a term (help center, 10 April 2026). That article doesn’t say which plans include it.

Neither article says whether you need your own Brand Registry access to see this data. For full reverse-ASIN keyword lists that go beyond the top three, see our Helium 10 Cerebro guide. Our keyword research tools comparison and Amazon search analytics tools comparison cover the options. Treat any tool’s volume figures as estimates, and check them against Search Query Performance where you can.