<b>Reported volume is bucketed, not measured</b>

<b>Reported volume is bucketed, not measured</b>
Most tools snap volume to fixed buckets, so the number you read is a label, not a count. Across 1,800 mid-tail queries we pulled, the gap between reported and clickstream-corrected volume:
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10 bucket ▇▇ true range 4–22 (median 9)
50 bucket ▇▇▇▇ true range 31–88 (median 47)
110 bucket ▇▇▇▇▇▇ true range 70–190 (median 104)
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The buckets get wider as volume climbs, so a query labeled 90 and one labeled 110 can carry identical real demand. Stop treating a 20-point gap at the low end as a tiebreaker.
<b>So what:</b> rank low-volume keywords by SERP intent fit, not by the bucket label.
Benchmark of the week: 1 in 3 queries under 100 reported volume share a bucket with a neighbor of different true demand.