Buyer Intent Keywordsthe phrases that signal someone's ready to buy

SurveyMonkey's study with Reddit, among 1,202 US business decision-makers, found 83% complete their research via peer communities and self-directed search before ever engaging with a sales team. G2's 2025 Buyer Behavior Report, surveying 1,169 B2B decision-makers, puts the same shift in terms of sequence: nearly two out of three buyers now prefer engaging with vendor salespeople only in the later stages of their buying journey, up 17 percentage points in a year.

So the interesting part of the funnel has moved somewhere you cannot see unless you watch the language — and the researcher is not asking a vendor. 73% of those decision-makers trust peer insights above vendor websites, search engines and review sites. Each phrase is an invitation to a peer conversation, which is why answering one badly is so conspicuous.

A complete monitoring list has five kinds of entry — problem phrases, ask-phrases, competitor names, category terms, and your brand with its misspellings. Our guide to social listening keywords covers that, plus scoping and list size; start there if you have not built one. This page takes the two of those five that carry buying intent and opens them up: sorted by funnel stage rather than by kind, with the phrases written out, the per-platform rewrites, and the false positives each family generates. The other direction — the sentences people write before they believe a product exists, like “is there a tool that” or “am I the only one who” — is research rather than pipeline, and our guide to finding pain points on Reddit takes those.

The person has the problem and does not know your category has a name, so the only thing to watch for is their description of the work itself. Longest window, lowest urgency, least contested — every competitor you have is watching for their own name instead. What works here is not a recommendation but a description of how other people solve the same thing.

• “doing this by hand” · “still doing this manually” · “doing it manually every week”
• “is there a way to” · “there has to be a better way”
• “sick of copying” · “copy and paste into a spreadsheet” · “our spreadsheet for [job]”
• “wasting hours on” · “takes me all morning to” · “whose whole job is [job]”
• Write these in your customers' words. If the phrase appears on your homepage, it is the wrong phrase.

The highest-converting family and the shortest window. Somebody has decided software exists for this and is asking peers which one, so the thread has a deadline: the answers that arrive before it settles are the ones that get read, and the ones the next person with the same question finds later.

• “any tool for” · “looking for something that”
• “recommend a tool for” · “recommendations for” · “any recommendations” · “suggestions for a”
• “what do you use for” · “what are people using for” · “what's everyone using” · “how are you tracking”
• “best [category] for [buyer type]” — high volume, and the noisiest entry here. Scope it.

Two or three named options and one question standing in front of a purchase. These convert fastest of anything here and punish a wrong answer hardest, because everyone in the thread knows the products well enough to check you. The etiquette is fixed: answer what was asked, name the case where the other option wins, and disclose that you build one of them.

• “is [product] worth it” · “worth the money” · “worth paying for” · “is [product] any good”
• “[product A] vs [product B]” · “[product] or [product]” · “anyone compared”
• “alternative to [product]” · “alternatives to [product]” · “something like [product] but”
• “anyone actually using [product]” · “does [product] do [job]” · “can [product] handle”
• “thinking about buying” · “about to sign up for” · “on the fence about”

Somebody is leaving a product in your category. The category question is settled, the money is already being spent, and the only open decision is where it goes next — the most commercially valuable family here, and the one with the most rules attached.

The rule: do not pile on. In a thread about somebody else's product you are the one participant with an obvious stake in the answer, and everybody reading knows it. Answer only if the person asks what else exists, and write it as if the competitor were reading.

• “moving away from [product]” · “migrating off” · “switching from [product]” · “moved off [product]”
• “canceling our [product]” · “not renewing” · “cancelled our subscription to”
• “fed up with [product]” · “anyone else having trouble with” · “[product] has gotten worse”
• “[product] price increase” · “[product] new pricing” · “can't justify [product] anymore”
• “looking for a replacement for” · “what did you move to” · “life after [product]”

The family everyone skips, and the only one where the correct action is usually to read and say nothing. It carries proof you can point at, early warning that a customer is unhappy in public, and the wording real users choose for your category — which is where next quarter's keywords come from.

• “finally switched to” · “we ended up going with” · “we moved to [product] and”
• “six months in with” · “a year of using” · “still using [product] after”
• “wish [product] did” · “the only thing missing from [product]” — feature demand, phrased as praise.
• Your own product name and its misspellings — the one brand entry this page keeps, because complaints arrive spelled wrong.
• Reply to thank, to fix, or to answer a follow-up. Never to pitch.

Read the middle column above as one buyer writing in five rooms in the same week. What survives every rewrite is short — “any tool for”, “recs for”, “how do you handle”, “best social listening”, “open to recommendations” — and those fragments are what belongs in the keyword field. The full sentence never repeats exactly.

ParseStream's default is Broad Match, which requires every word in your keyword to appear somewhere in the text, in any order and any distance apart. So “alternative to” asks for “alternative” and for “to” — and “to” is in essentially every post ever written. That keyword therefore behaves almost exactly like the bare word “alternative”, which is the noisiest possible version of what you meant.

The same goes for “is there a way to”, “how do you handle”, “what do you use for” and most of the solution-seeking family, all built from the commonest words in the language. Phrase Match makes them what you thought you were typing: one literal string, in order, re-checked locally rather than quoted upstream in any platform's search. Use it wherever meaning lives in the word order — “alternative to”, “moving away from”, “worth it”, “[A] vs [B]” — and leave Broad Match for concepts that can be said several ways.

The other half is ordinary ambiguity, and it is worth predicting rather than discovering. Each of these fires constantly in conversations with nothing to do with software:

• “alternative to” — alternative medicine, alternative energy, alternative rock. The biggest single source of junk here.
• “worth it” — films, degrees, gym memberships, a flight with a layover.
• “switching from” / “moving away from” — jobs, cities, programming languages, phone carriers.
• “canceling” — streaming services, flights, plans for the weekend.
• “recommendations for” — restaurants, books, contractors. The verb is not the signal; the noun beside it is.
• Matching is a case-insensitive substring test that neither respects word boundaries nor stems anything, so a short keyword also fires inside longer words.

Work down this list rather than deleting the keyword — the phrase that catches vendors is usually the same one that catches buyers.

• Add the noun. “Alternative to” is a shape; “alternative to [your category]” is a question about your market. Most of the ambiguity above disappears here.
• Scope it. A per-keyword subreddit list narrows results after a site-wide Reddit search, so a broad phrase pinned to three or four communities becomes readable. Reddit-only, and it can only narrow.
• Describe the exception in plain English. An AI Filter on that keyword — “only keep threads where the writer is weighing two products they name” — is checked against every mention that matched, and lets you loosen the keyword underneath it.
• Expect other vendors. “Alternative to [big product]” is exactly what your competitors write in their own marketing posts, which is what the promotional tag is for.

Keywords are added one at a time, and each carries its own settings rather than inheriting a global config: which of the five platforms it runs on, Broad or Phrase Match, posts or comments or both, an optional subreddit list on Reddit, and an optional AI Filter.

That is what makes a list like this practical: “alternative to [rival]” can run on Phrase Match across Reddit and Quora with a filter attached while “doing this by hand” runs Broad Match on Reddit alone, scoped to three subreddits.

Half the false positives on this page are judgements about a sentence rather than facts about its words, and no keyword can hold a judgement. An AI Filter can: a plain-English instruction attached to one keyword, checked against every mention that matched it.

Lead Detection is the second pass, asking a different question — not “does this match the rule” but “would this writer plausibly buy what you sell”, scored against your brand description. Each pass costs a credit per mention it checks and an approved mention costs one more, so a tighter list is a cheaper one.

Whenever an AI Filter or Lead Detection is running on a keyword, each mention also gets one intent tag at no extra cost — buy intent, product question, competitor complaint, pain point, testimonial or promotional. That is the machine answering the question this page asks: which family did this land in?

The Leads view collects the two that mean somebody is shopping, buy intent and product question — the queue to open on a busy morning. Pain-point, competitor-complaint and testimonial mentions deliberately do not appear there; reach those with the intent filter and treat them as a slower queue. The tags are also the report card on your swipe file: a phrase producing nothing but promotional tags is catching vendors, and one producing nothing but pain points is catching people months away.

A phrase that fires puts a stranger's question in front of you, and everything after that is writing. ParseStream drafts a Suggested Reply from your brand context and the thread it appeared in, at 5 credits each; you edit it and post it yourself from your own account, because automatic posting is disabled at the server level by design.

What to actually say — lead with the answer, trade adjectives for specifics, disclose in the reply rather than in your profile, skip the link — is a whole guide of its own, and it is the one to read next.