Navigational intent describes a search in which the person wants to reach a specific website or page and uses the search engine as a shortcut. Typical queries are brand names, with or without words like login.
What do navigational searches look like?
Examples are “facebook”, “gmail” or “reddit login” (the last is one of the examples in Google’s rater guidelines, section 12.7.3). The searcher already knows the destination. Common patterns are company names, product names, and a brand combined with words such as login, support or pricing (assessment).
Navigational queries are one of the three classes in Broder’s 2002 taxonomy. Google’s rater guidelines have a “Website” category for queries aimed at a specific site, but the labels are not a one-to-one match (assessment).
What does this mean for SEO?
For your own brand, the aim is that the right page appears first: homepage for the company name, a login page for “brand login”, a pricing page for “brand pricing” (assessment). Fixing unclear navigation and links usually comes before writing thin pages for every brand phrase, and Search Console queries help to find mismatches (assessment). Ranking for another company’s navigational query is rarely realistic, because searchers want that company’s site.
Example
“youtube” leads to a site’s homepage, “reddit login” to a sign-in page and “semrush blog” to a section of a site. The table compares navigational intent with the other types. The queries are illustrative examples, not data.
| Type | Characteristic | Example | Category in Google's rater guidelines | Origin of the label |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Short tail | short, broad term at the head of the demand curve; intent is often unclear | “coffee machine” | – | counterpart to the long tail; no clear first source |
| Mid tail | between the head and the long end of the curve; more specific than short tail, broader than long tail | “coffee machine with grinder” | – | no clear first source |
| Long tail | specific, rarely searched query, usually several words long | “coffee machine with grinder under 300 euros” | – | term from Chris Anderson, “The Long Tail”, Wired, October 2004 |
| Informational | find information on a topic | “how to descale a coffee machine” | Know, special case Know Simple | Broder 2002, “A taxonomy of web search” |
| Navigational (this term) | reach a specific website or page | “reddit login” | Website | Broder 2002, “A taxonomy of web search” |
| Transactional | perform an activity on the web, such as buying or downloading | “buy coffee machine” | Do | Broder 2002, “A taxonomy of web search” |
| Commercial investigation | consider a purchase and compare first | “best coffee machine” | no category of its own | industry usage; neither in Broder nor in the rater guidelines |
| Visit-in-person | go to a nearby place, such as a shop | “gas stations” | Visit-in-Person | Search Quality Rater Guidelines, section 12.7.4 |
No primary source defines the boundaries between short, mid and long tail, whether by word count or by search volume. The table therefore gives no thresholds; the characteristics of the three tail types are based on practical experience. Google said in 2019 that 15 percent of daily queries were ones it had never seen before. Mapping Broder's types to Know, Website and Do is an inference, not a Google statement. According to the rater guidelines, a query can have several intents, and the line between Know and Do is often blurry. Examples are chosen freely; “reddit login” and “gas stations” come from the guidelines. Sources: Google: Search Quality Rater Guidelines, Abschnitt 12.7 Understanding User Intent (Ausgabe 11.09.2025); Broder, A.: A taxonomy of web search. SIGIR Forum 36(2), 2002; Anderson, C.: The Long Tail. Wired, Oktober 2004; Google Blog: Understanding searches better than ever before (2019). Last checked: .
Sources
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