How the grouping works
Each keyword is split into words, common stop words are dropped and plurals are trimmed. Two keywords land in the same group when they share at least the number of words you choose. Groups are labelled by their most common terms, given a rough intent from the modifiers they contain (how, cost and guide lean informational; services, agency, hire and best lean commercial), and ordered by total volume if you pasted it. This is lexical clustering, not SERP clustering: it does not check whether Google actually ranks the same pages for two phrases, which is the final test before you commit to one page per group.
From groups to pages
- One commercial group with real volume usually becomes one service page. Two groups that share a head term but differ only by a city or industry become a parent page and children.
- Informational groups become guides or posts that link to the matching service page, not extra service pages.
- Groups of one keyword are either long-tail phrases to fold into a bigger page, or noise to delete.
When the list is large or the market is competitive, the SERP check and the intent decisions are where the time goes, and where mistakes cost pages that compete with each other. That work, with search data from Ahrefs and Google Keyword Planner rather than a pasted list, is the keyword research service, and the cannibalisation check on an existing site is part of the SEO audit.