| Keyword | Volume | CPC | Competition | 12-month trend |
|---|
How it works
The Yahoo Keyword Tool harvests real autocomplete suggestions from Yahoo's public suggest endpoint (the same engine that drives the dropdown on yahoo.com's search box) for any seed term you enter. Suggestions reflect what real Yahoo users have searched for. We then enrich every harvested keyword with monthly Google search volume, CPC, competition, and a 12-month trend via the Keywords Everywhere API.
How the harvest works. The harvester runs in your browser via JSONP (calls go from your IP, not ours) and hits Yahoo's search.yahoo.com/sugg/gossip/gossip-en-ura/ endpoint (the region path swaps for non-US countries). We iterate your seed combined with the alphabet (a-z, 0-9) plus ~70 modifier words spanning questions, comparisons, prepositions, buyer-intent qualifiers, and tutorials. For each prefix Yahoo returns 0-10 suggestions; we collect every unique one. A typical 5-seed harvest produces 200-500+ keywords.
Volume enrichment. As keywords are harvested, batches of 100 are sent to the KE API for Google volume, CPC, competition, and 12-month trend. Yahoo doesn't publish per-keyword volume publicly, so we use Google's data as a relative-popularity proxy that correlates well with Yahoo demand in practice.
Country targeting. The Country dropdown selects both Yahoo's region path and the volume-lookup country. Volume + CPC numbers will be specific to that country's Google data. Your last-picked country persists across sessions.
Conservative pacing. The harvest is paced at roughly one request every 1.5 seconds to stay below Yahoo's per-IP rate limit. A full 5-seed harvest takes ~15 minutes. You can stop early at any time and keep the keywords found so far.
Plan caps. On the Free plan you can run 500 keyword lookups per day across all our keyword tools combined.
What the columns mean
- Keyword
- The exact suggestion Yahoo's autosuggest returned for some prefix of your seed term. Click the cross-link icon to open the keyword in SERP Checker for a live SERP audit.
- Volume
- Monthly Google search volume averaged over the past 12 months, sourced from Google Keyword Planner via the Keywords Everywhere API. Yahoo doesn't publish per-keyword volume publicly; Google volume is used as a proxy that correlates with Yahoo demand in practice.
- CPC
- Average cost-per-click that advertisers pay in Google Ads for that keyword, in the country's currency. Higher CPCs indicate commercial-intent keywords with intense advertiser bidding.
- Competition
- Google Ads' competition score (Low / Medium / High), reflecting how many advertisers bid on the keyword. Since Yahoo's organic results are Bing's, Yahoo organic competition tracks Bing-level competition, which is typically lower than Google for the same term.
- 12-Month Trend
- Sparkline of monthly Google search volume over the past year. Useful for spotting seasonal patterns or rising/declining interest. Hover any point on the chart for the exact month-over-month value.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Yahoo Keyword Tool?
It's a free, no-signup keyword-research tool that harvests real autocomplete suggestions from Yahoo's public suggest endpoint for any seed term you enter, then enriches every harvested keyword with monthly Google search volume, CPC, competition, and a 12-month trend. The harvester runs in your browser (calls go from your IP), and the volume data comes from the Keywords Everywhere API.
Doesn't Yahoo just use Bing results?
Yahoo's organic search results are indeed powered by Bing under the hood (via the Yahoo-Bing search alliance that started in 2009). But Yahoo's autosuggest data comes from a completely separate endpoint (search.yahoo.com/sugg/gossip/...) and reflects what Yahoo's own user base searches for. Yahoo users skew older, more US-centric, and more email-and-news-portal-oriented than Bing's broader Windows-defaults audience. The two suggest streams diverge meaningfully in practice.
Why should I do keyword research for Yahoo specifically?
Two niches matter. First, Yahoo still has ~50-100 million monthly users in the US, predominantly older (50+) and reaching the site via Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, and the Yahoo homepage. If your audience is in that demographic (financial services, retirement, traditional retail, news, sports content), Yahoo traffic punches above its market-share weight. Second, since Yahoo's results come from Bing, ranking on Bing automatically improves your Yahoo visibility too.
How does Yahoo's autosuggest work?
Yahoo exposes autosuggest via the public search.yahoo.com/sugg/gossip/ endpoint (the same engine that drives the dropdown on the yahoo.com search box). The endpoint takes a region path segment (gossip-en-ura for US, etc.) and returns up to 10 suggestions per prefix as JSONP. We iterate your seed term combined with a-z, 0-9, and ~70 modifier words, collecting every unique suggestion. A typical 5-seed harvest produces 200-500+ keywords.
How is Yahoo different from Google for keyword research?
Yahoo's user base is older and skews toward content categories that match its homepage tiles: financial news, sports scores, celebrity gossip, weather, horoscopes, and traditional shopping (department stores, catalog brands). For seeds in those niches, Yahoo's suggest stream surfaces different phrasing than Google does (more formal, less mobile-typing-shorthand, more "how do I" than "how to"). For tech-trending or younger-audience seeds, Google captures more of the long tail.
Are the volume numbers Yahoo-specific?
No. The volume column shows Google search volume for the harvested phrase, sourced from Google Keyword Planner via the Keywords Everywhere API. Yahoo doesn't publish per-keyword volume publicly. In practice Google volumes correlate well with Yahoo demand. Read the number as a relative-popularity signal, not an absolute Yahoo query count.
Why does the harvest take ~15 minutes?
To stay below Yahoo's per-IP rate limit we space requests out at ~one every 1.5 seconds. A 5-seed harvest makes about 530 calls (5 seeds x 106 modifiers), which takes ~15 minutes. Hammering the endpoint faster than that quickly leads to IP throttling. You can leave the tab open; results stream into the table as they're found, and you can stop early to keep the keywords harvested so far.
How do I make my content rank on Yahoo?
Yahoo organic results are Bing's organic results, so the answer is: optimize for Bing. Submit your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools, focus on technical SEO (clean HTML, fast loading, mobile-friendly), use clear page titles and meta descriptions, and earn backlinks from high-quality sites. Bing also weights social signals more heavily than Google, so meaningful engagement on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter helps. Whatever helps Bing helps Yahoo.