Build a keyword list from what people search for today, check when demand peaks and read the pages you'd be competing with, without leaving Claude. With the Firecrawl connector, Claude does keyword research on search-interest data from Trends and Similarweb traffic in Firecrawl Alexandria, and scrapes the results that come up for a term.
Best for
- Writers and editors turning one topic into a set of articles.
- SEO managers using Claude for SEO research on phrasing and publishing dates.
- Small business owners checking which local wording people use.
Connector and data providers
Connector: the Firecrawl connector. Once connected, Claude can search the web, turn result pages into readable text and call Firecrawl Alexandria providers, all billed to the Firecrawl team that approved it.
Data providers in Firecrawl Alexandria
| Provider | Tool | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Trends | Related queries | The searches most often made with a term (each given a 0 to 100 score) and the fastest-growing ones, for a chosen place and period. |
| Trends | Interest over time | Up to five terms plotted on one shared 0 to 100 scale, which shows seasonality and which wording draws more interest. |
| Trends | Interest by region | The countries, states, metros or cities where a term is searched most. |
| Trends | Suggestions | Topic IDs that tell apart different meanings of the same word. No charge. |
| Trends | Trending now | Breakout searches in a country across the last 4 hours up to 7 days, with rough volumes. |
| Similarweb | Traffic and engagement | Monthly visit counts, unique visitors, bounce rate and pages viewed per visit for a domain. Billed per metric that comes back. |
| Similarweb | Marketing channel shares | The split of a domain's traffic across marketing channels for a single month. |
Explore Firecrawl Alexandria data providers across categories
Starter prompt
Put your own seed term and market in place of mine:
Use Firecrawl to research keywords around "standing desk" for the US,
using Trends in Firecrawl Alexandria plus Firecrawl search. Tell me the
cost of each tool before you call it.
I want:
- Top related queries and rising queries over the last 12 months, with
scores.
- A 12-month interest comparison of the two strongest candidates.
- The pages that come up for the stronger one, scraped, listing H1, H2s
and rough word count.
Present Trends numbers as relative interest only. Don't make up search
volumes or difficulty scores.Before you start
- Link Firecrawl. Visit the Firecrawl connector and click Connect. Firecrawl then has you log in (new accounts are free), choose the team that pays and grant access, and that's the whole setup: no API key, no MCP configuration. See Firecrawl in Claude for screenshots.
- Enable it per conversation. Go to the + menu in your chat, then Connectors, and switch Firecrawl on.
- Budget for Similarweb. Similarweb tools cost far more per call than Trends and also draw on a separate monthly Similarweb allowance for your team.
In Claude, go to Customize → Connectors, pick Firecrawl, and under Tool permissions set the Read-only tools group to Always allow, so Claude can run lookups without asking each time. Some of those lookups use Firecrawl credits, so keep confirmation on if you'd rather approve each paid call yourself.
Limitations of using Claude for SEO keyword research without Firecrawl
Choosing keywords means comparing demand, timing and competition, and Claude keyword research without data has trouble with all three.
- No search engine data. Semrush tested AI chatbots for keyword work and notes they have no direct line to search engine data, which means they can't reliably judge a keyword's popularity or ranking difficulty (Semrush). When a model fills a table with monthly volumes anyway, Ahrefs calls those numbers guesses rather than metrics (Ahrefs).
- Numbers that sound right. Anthropic's help center warns that Claude's output can be wrong or misleading and shouldn't be your only source of truth (Anthropic). A tidy volume column is exactly where that slips through.
- Demand after the cutoff. Anthropic says a Claude model can miss events that happened after its training cutoff (Anthropic). New products and new phrasings people started searching this year are the blind spot.
- Timing is invisible. Google's Search Central guide says query demand moves with new trends and with the seasons, and points to Google Trends to check it (Google Search Central). A brainstormed list says nothing about when to publish.
- Location shapes results. Anthropic notes that Claude's web search may use a location inferred from your IP address (Anthropic), which can make results differ from what searchers in your target market see.
How Claude combines Trends, search results and Similarweb with Firecrawl
Keyword research with Claude draws on several sources:
- Firecrawl Alexandria: a single route from AI agents to sourced data, with more than 100 official providers covered by paid agreements and indexes Firecrawl operates for crawled web content, scholarly work, software docs and government material. In blind AI-judged testing over 845 tasks with the model and prompts held constant, agents on Firecrawl Alexandria outscored agents on default web tools by 21% on answer quality.
- Demand from Trends: related and rising queries grow a seed term into candidates, and interest over time shows the calendar. When we ran "standing desk" for the US over 12 months, "electric standing desk" topped related queries at 100, and "electric adjustable standing desk" had grown 550%.
- Competition from the pages themselves: Firecrawl search finds the pages that appear for a term and returns their text, so Claude can compare headings, depth and format.
- Scale from Similarweb: visits and channel mix for competing domains. For August 2026, ahrefs.com showed roughly 8.3 million visits worldwide in our test.
Keyword research in Claude with and without Firecrawl Alexandria
| Claude without tools | Claude with Firecrawl Alexandria | |
|---|---|---|
| Candidate keywords | Brainstormed from memory | Related and rising queries for a set country and period |
| Demand figures | Plausible but unsourced | Relative 0 to 100 scores and growth percentages, clearly labeled |
| Seasonality | Not available | Interest across any window, from the last hour back to 2004 |
| Geography | One list for everywhere | Breakdowns by country, state, metro or city |
| Ranking pages | Not visible | Scraped search results with their headings and content |
| Competitor traffic | Estimated | Similarweb visits and channel shares for a named month |
| Source | None given | Trends and Similarweb, two of the 100+ providers in Firecrawl Alexandria. Explore the catalog |
Build your own keyword research workflow
Here are two Claude SEO prompts for different kinds of site. For a content team:
Use Firecrawl to pull rising Trends queries related to "home espresso
machine" in the US over 3 months and over 12 months, sort them into three
intent groups and propose one headline for each group.For a service business in one state:
With Firecrawl, compare Trends interest in "emergency plumber" versus
"24 hour plumber" across Texas metros for the last 12 months, and say
which one wins in Houston, Dallas and Austin.A seed term, a location and a time window give Claude enough to make narrow calls and report data rather than guesses.
Take it further
Decide on wording
Use Firecrawl to compare US Trends interest in "standing desk" and
"walking pad" over five years and name the peak months for each.Study the top results
With Firecrawl, search "best standing desk", scrape the first five pages
and list their H2s, length and whether each has a comparison table.Compare competitor traffic
Use Firecrawl to get Similarweb worldwide visits for flexispot.com and
upliftdesk.com in August 2026. Quote the price before running.Find a breakout topic
With Firecrawl, show what's trending in US search over the last 48 hours,
with approximate volumes and the related searches for each.Check costs first
Use Firecrawl to list tools for search interest, related queries and
website traffic, with prices, without running them.What it costs
Nothing is charged while you look through tools and their prices. The connected Firecrawl team is charged only when Claude actually runs a priced tool, and Firecrawl pricing explains plan allowances.
| Tool | Answers | Credits per call |
|---|---|---|
| Firecrawl search and scrape | The pages showing up and their content | 2 per 10 results, plus 1 per scraped page |
| Suggestions (Trends) | Which meaning of a term to measure | 0 |
| Related queries (Trends) | Adjacent and rising searches | 5 |
| Interest over time (Trends) | Seasonality and phrasing comparisons | 5 |
| Interest by region (Trends) | Where demand is concentrated | 5 |
| Trending now (Trends) | Searches surging right now | 5 |
| Marketing channel shares (Similarweb) | A domain's traffic sources | 550 per row returned |
| Traffic and engagement (Similarweb) | A domain's monthly traffic | 110 per metric returned |
Claude's reply names each tool it called and the credits charged.
[ Keyword research in Claude ]
Add Firecrawl to Claude and pick keywords from live search-interest data. Topic suggestions cost nothing.
Related use cases
- How to use Claude for research: ground a content brief in research papers and government data.
- How to use Claude at work: competitor, sales and vendor research with more providers.
- How to find podcast sponsors in Claude: see which brands in your space buy podcast ads.
Coverage limits
- Interest, not search counts. Trends scores run from 0 to 100 relative to the highest point in your range, which is good for ranking candidates against each other but not for monthly volumes. Rare terms may return no related queries.
- Ranking difficulty is on you. No tool here scores keyword difficulty, so weigh it from the scraped pages and the strength of the sites that publish them.