Keyword density
Keyword density is how often a word or phrase appears on a page, as a share of all the words on it.
Keyword density is how often a word or phrase appears on a page, as a share of all its words. If "cold brew" appears 10 times in a 1,000-word guide, its keyword density is 1%.
It was once a number SEOs aimed for, on the idea that search engines judged a page's subject by counting words. They stopped working that simply a long time ago, and today density is mostly useful as a warning light.
Why there's no right number
You'll still see advice to hit 1% or 2%. Google has never published a target, and its ranking systems try to work out what a page means as a whole. A page that's genuinely about cold brew will use the phrase naturally, along with related words like steeping, coarse grind and concentrate.
What a density check can do is catch the extremes. A phrase repeated so often it reads badly is keyword stuffing, which Google lists as spam. A page that never once uses the words people search with may be harder to match to the question.
Density and AI answers
AI models read text as meaning, through embeddings, and they look for a passage that answers the question. Repeating a phrase doesn't make a passage more of an answer.
Placement matters more than count. For example, Kestrel Roasters' guide could repeat "cold brew ratio" 15 times and still lose to a page with one heading that asks "What's the best cold brew ratio?" and one sentence under it that answers: "Use 1 part coarse ground coffee to 8 parts water for a drink you can serve straight."
In AnswerOrbit
Two of the eight Page checks in Recommendations look at this from the useful side. The prompt in a heading checks that a heading says what the prompt asks, and An opening that answers checks that the page's opening answers it. See Recommendations.