What do kept, dropped and unverified mean?

Every keyword the research finds ends up in one of three states, and the reason is shown under the keyword.

Kept

Someone typing it could plausibly become a customer of the business described in the profile, and it has measured search volume. Kept keywords go on to grouping and, if their group is inspected, to a decision.

Dropped

The keyword did not fit. Common reasons:

• It is about something the business does not sell, or a different product category.
• It is about jobs, salaries, free downloads or another site's brand.
• It contains one of your brand terms, so you already rank for it by name.
• It contains one of your excluded terms.

Dropped keywords stay in the table with their reason, so you can see what was considered and add a term to the profile if something was dropped wrongly.

Unverified

The phrase came from a real customer discussion, quoted verbatim, but the keyword databases have no recorded volume for it. That does not mean nobody searches it; long, specific phrases often fall below the databases' threshold. It stays in the table, flagged, and is never inflated into a number it does not have. If several unverified phrases point at the same need, that need is real demand the databases cannot see.