SEO Glossary · Content

Informational intent

A query carries informational intent when the searcher wants to understand something and has no vendor in mind yet. In 2026 that half of the search graph is the half AI Overviews absorbed first, so the operational question is no longer how to rank an explainer, it's what an explainer is still supposed to earn you.

BD
Benoit Demonchaux
Founder · Nautilinks
Updated July 29, 2026 · 10 min read
Key takeaways The essentials in 30 seconds
  • →Intent belongs to the query as Google resolves it, not to the keyword string: if the top 10 are guides and the page you plan is a product page, the intent argument is already lost.
  • →Informational is the largest bucket and the most eroded one: SE Ranking's 2025 split put around 53% of queries in it, and Ahrefs' December 2025 study on 300k keywords measured a ~58% drop in position-1 CTR on keywords that trigger an AI Overview.
  • →Simple « what is X » explainers are no longer a traffic asset in 2026. They are a citation asset, a topical-coverage asset and a link-magnet asset, and they should be budgeted as such.
  • →Heroic Rankings' 2026 analysis found 40% of AI Overview sources ranked only in positions 11 to 20, which means being cited is a partly separate game from ranking, and depth of verifiable fact is what buys the citation.
  • →In a netlinking operation, informational pages are what makes a host credible and what gives an editorial link somewhere natural to sit. Commercial pages rarely earn links on their own.
  • →Tool intent labels from Semrush or Ahrefs are model guesses on the keyword, not observations of the SERP. Use them to sort ten thousand keywords, never to arbitrate the twenty that carry your budget.
3 questions to test your knowledge Read first, the quiz is waiting at the bottom.
List of six checks to run when qualifying an informational query: open the SERP, identify the sub-type, place it in the buying journey, size the format, check whether an AI Overview is present and choose the tracking metric.
Six checks to qualify an informational query before adding it to the editorial plan.

What informational intent actually covers

Someone types « why do backlinks lose value over time » and nothing in that query says buy. It says explain. That is informational intent in its raw form, and the operational consequence is immediate: no amount of link equity will push a commercial page onto that SERP, because Google has already calibrated the result set around a different definition of a helpful answer. Intent is not a soft marketing notion here, it is the hard constraint that decides whether the page you are about to commission has any chance at all.

The bucket is bigger than most keyword exports suggest. SE Ranking's 2025 query split put roughly 53% of searches in the informational category, against 32% navigational, 15% commercial and under 1% transactional. Most of what people search for is not a purchase, it is a question, a definition, a how-to, a comparison of concepts rather than of products. For anyone building content at scale, that is where the volume lives and where the competition for attention is now hardest.

The part practitioners get wrong is attribution. Intent does not live in the keyword string, it lives in the query as Google resolves it, and the same words can carry different intent depending on context, market and season. « Netlinking » on google.fr returns agency pages and definitions in the same SERP because Google refuses to arbitrate between a reader who wants to understand the practice and one who wants to buy it. When a SERP hedges like that, it is telling you the intent is mixed, and a page that picks a single side loses half the addressable clicks.

Three numbered steps showing how informational queries progress: definition during the discovery phase, procedure during the evaluation phase, understanding just before the budget decision.
The three informational sub-types match three distinct moments in the buying journey.

The four intent types, and where the boundaries blur

The standard taxonomy splits queries into informational, navigational, commercial investigation and transactional. Informational means the searcher wants knowledge. Navigational means they want a specific website and typed its name instead of a URL. Commercial investigation means they are comparing before buying, the classic « best X », « X vs Y », « X reviews » family. Transactional means the wallet is already out.

This short overview of the four types is a useful reset before we get into the operational detail:

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BD
Benoit Demonchaux Founder · Nautilinks

Founder and operator of Nautilinks. Edits and writes the site's editorial glossary, as well as the content published across the Nautilinks network of editorial media.

Frequently asked questions

If informational traffic is collapsing, is there still a case for publishing explainers?

Yes, but for different returns. Explainers are what makes a domain look like a real publication, what earns editorial links, and what gets pulled into generative answers. Seer's 2026 data shows brands cited in AI Overviews earn around 120% more organic clicks per impression than uncited ones on the same query. Budget them as authority and citation assets with a multi-quarter payback, and hold them to a coverage and citation target rather than a sessions target.

How do you tell an informational query from a commercial investigation one when the SERP mixes both?

Count the result types in the top ten. A SERP that mixes guides with comparison pages and vendor sites is Google refusing to arbitrate, which means the query serves two audiences. The right response is one page that teaches properly and then names concrete options, not two pages competing for the same term. Check the ratio again every quarter: mixed SERPs drift faster than stable ones, especially since Overviews started expanding into commercial territory during 2025.

Are the intent labels in Semrush and Ahrefs reliable enough to plan from?

They are reliable enough to sort a ten thousand keyword export into rough piles, and not reliable enough to arbitrate the twenty terms carrying your budget. Those labels are classifier outputs computed on the keyword string, not observations of the live SERP in your target country. Head terms with mixed intent are the systematic failure case, and they are usually the highest-value terms in the list. Sort with the tool, decide with the SERP.

Does informational content actually help a netlinking campaign, or is it just filler?

It carries the campaign. Commercial pages almost never earn editorial citations on their own merit, so equity has to enter through explainers, studies and reference pages and then flow inward. On the host side the same logic applies: a media property with genuine informational depth places a sponsored article credibly, one without it does not. Judging a host on its informational coverage predicts durability better than any third-party authority score.

What makes a page get cited inside an AI Overview rather than just ranked?

Extractable factual density, mostly. Position Digital's 2026 compilation reports that cited articles contain roughly 62% more distinct factual statements than uncited ones. Heroic Rankings found 40% of Overview sources ranked only in positions 11 to 20, so citation is not a simple function of rank. Write statements a machine can lift without ambiguity, name entities explicitly, source your numbers, and keep delivery fast.

Should informational pages target Featured Snippets in 2026?

Snippet formatting still costs nothing and occasionally wins, but it is no longer the objective. On queries that trigger an Overview, the snippet inherits a fraction of the clicks it did two years ago: Ahrefs measured a ~58% cut in position-1 CTR on those keywords in December 2025. Optimise the page to be the source the summary leans on. The formatting habits overlap anyway, so you get the snippet as a side effect rather than as a goal.

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Quiz: Informational intent

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According to Heroic Rankings' 2026 analysis, what share of AI Overview sources ranked only in organic positions 11 to 20?
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The boundary that costs money is the one between informational and commercial. Competitors treat it as a clean line, and it is not. « How to choose a link vendor » looks informational, reads informational, and converts like a commercial query because the person asking it has a budget and a deadline. Conversely « backlink price » looks commercial and is often pure research, someone benchmarking before they build a business case. What separates the two is not the words, it is the stage of the buyer journey behind them, and that stage is visible in the SERP: if Google mixes in comparison pages, listicles and vendor sites, the query is commercially loaded whatever your tool says.

Ahrefs popularised a useful shorthand for reading that: the three C's of search intent, meaning content type, content format and content angle. Type is what kind of page ranks, a blog post or a product page. Format is how it is built, a how-to, a list, a tool, a video. Angle is the promise, beginner-friendly, 2026-updated, data-backed. Two pages can share the same intent and still fail against each other because they got the angle wrong, and that failure is invisible in any keyword tool.

2026 mechanics: AI Overviews took the easy half

Here is the stance, stated plainly: informational content is no longer a traffic strategy, and anyone still budgeting it as one is measuring a channel that has structurally moved. Semrush tracking showed AI Overviews appearing on 6.49% of queries in January 2025, peaking at 24.61% in July 2025, then settling around 15.69% by November 2025. Heroic Rankings' 2026 analysis found 88% of the keywords triggering an AI Overview were informational. The feature was aimed at exactly this bucket, and it hit it.

The click data confirms the damage. Seer Interactive, analysing 25.1 million organic impressions between 2024 and 2025, measured organic CTR on AI Overview queries falling from 1.76% in June 2024 to 0.61% in September 2025, a 61% drop. Ahrefs' December 2025 study across 300,000 keywords measured a ~58% reduction in position-1 CTR on AI Overview keywords, against 34.5% when they ran the same measurement in April 2025. The erosion accelerated through the year. Long-form pages that answer a simple « what is X » question absorbed the worst of it, for the obvious reason that a two-sentence generated summary fully satisfies a two-sentence need.

What did not disappear is the value of being the source. Seer's 2026 update on AI Overview CTR reports that brands cited inside an Overview receive around 120% more organic clicks per impression than uncited competitors on the same informational query. And Heroic Rankings found 40% of AI Overview sources ranked only in positions 11 to 20, which is the single most useful fact in this whole area: citation selection is not a straight read of the organic ranking. A page can be pulled into the answer without owning the SERP, which changes what you optimise for and changes which pages deserve links.

Classifying a query without guessing

Read the SERP, always, before anything else. Question words are a weak signal on their own, and the presence of a Featured Snippet, a People Also Ask block or a video carousel tells you more about what Google thinks the searcher wants than the phrasing ever will. If nine of the top ten results are guides and the tenth is a vendor page sitting on a very old domain, the informational reading is settled and the vendor page is a legacy artefact, not an invitation.

This walkthrough of intent analysis during keyword research covers the practical reading method well:

Semrush's Keyword Overview and the equivalent Ahrefs field will label thousands of keywords in one pass, and that is genuinely useful at the top of a funnel where you need to sort a raw export into rough piles. It stops being useful the moment real budget attaches to a specific term. Those labels are classifier outputs computed on the keyword, not observations of the live SERP in your country, and they routinely mislabel mixed-intent head terms as purely informational. Sort with the tool, arbitrate with your own eyes, and re-check quarterly, because intent drifts: Google shifted a large share of Overviews from purely informational queries into commercial and transactional territory across 2025, and a page written against last year's SERP can find itself facing a different result set entirely.

Search Console closes the loop. Queries landing on a page that you designed as commercial, but which are phrased as questions, are telling you the market reads your topic differently than you do. That mismatch is usually a missing page in your coverage rather than a problem with the page you already have.

What informational pages are worth in a netlinking operation

Two things, and neither of them is raw traffic. First, informational pages are what makes a host credible. A site that only publishes commercial content looks like what it is, and editors, readers and algorithms all price it accordingly. The owned French editorial media we operate at Stringer are built the other way round, on genuine informational coverage of their vertical, which is precisely why an editorial placement on one of them reads as a normal article rather than as an ad slot. When you evaluate hosts on any catalogue of media open to sponsored content, the informational depth of the site is a better proxy for durability than any third-party authority score.

Second, informational pages are what earns links inbound. Commercial pages almost never attract editorial citations on their own merit, which is why the standard architecture routes equity from explainers and studies toward money pages. That is the whole logic behind building recognised coverage across a subject instead of chasing isolated terms. SurferSEO's 2025 analysis of 36 million AI Overviews and 46 million citations found YouTube supplying about 23.3% of citations, Wikipedia 18.4% and Google's own properties 16.4%, with Reddit at only 5.5% according to Heroic Rankings' 2026 figures. Structured, authoritative, reference-shaped informational assets are what gets cited, both by generative answers and by journalists.

The measurement that follows from this is different too. Position Digital's 2026 compilation reports that articles cited in AI Overviews contain around 62% more distinct factual statements than uncited ones, and that roughly 45.48% of informational queries produce citations of articles rather than listicles or product pages. Density of verifiable fact is the lever. If you are planning budget around this, price an informational asset as an authority investment with a long payback, the same way you would plan a link acquisition programme over several quarters, and stop judging it on month-one sessions.

Writing informational content that still earns something

This short breakdown of informational keyword targeting is a decent baseline before the corrections that follow:

The most common failure we see in audits is one page per question. A site ends up with forty thin pages that each answer a variation of the same thing, competing with each other and offering a generative answer engine no reason to prefer any of them. Consolidate into a page substantial enough to be a reference, and let internal anchors handle the variations.

The second failure is ignoring buyer stage. An informational query asked by someone three months from a purchase deserves a different page than the same query asked by a student. The tell is in the SERP again: if vendor pages and comparison content are creeping into the top ten, the audience is late-stage, and a purely pedagogical treatment will underperform against a page that teaches and then names concrete options.

The third is format monoculture. Competitors write the same 2,000-word article for every informational term, when a share of these queries resolve better as a calculator, a data table, a short video or a diagram. Given YouTube's weight in citation datasets, an embedded video on a how-to query is not decoration, it matches how the answer is actually consumed and it gives the query a second surface to be found on.

Last, stop chasing the Featured Snippet as if it were the prize. On a query that triggers an Overview, the snippet position now inherits a fraction of the clicks it did two years ago. The prize is being the source the summary leans on, and that is won with original data, clear entity naming, fast delivery and statements a machine can extract without ambiguity. Goodfirms' 2026 survey found 43% of marketers actively implementing generative engine optimisation, up from near zero the year before. The tactics are new, the underlying requirement is not: publish something a reasonable editor would cite.