Walmart Keyword Research: 2026 Guide for SEO and Ads

Walmart keyword research is the work of finding the words Walmart shoppers type, then using them in two places: your item listings and your Sponsored Products campaigns.

Most guides still answer it with a list of third-party tools. In 2026 that is the wrong starting point, because Walmart now gives sellers and advertisers its own search data for free.

This guide shows where that data lives, how to turn it into a keyword list, and how to run it through match types, negatives and harvesting. We finish with a worked example from an automatic campaign.

What Is Walmart Keyword Research?

Walmart keyword research is the process of identifying the search queries Walmart.com shoppers use for products like yours, judging which ones are relevant and worth winning, and mapping them to listing content and ad targeting.

It serves two jobs that feed each other. Organic: your title, key features and description have to contain the words shoppers search, or Walmart will not treat the item as relevant. Paid: your Sponsored Products campaigns bid on those same words, and their reports show you which ones actually sell.

We treat them as one loop. Listing keywords decide what an automatic campaign can match, and the search terms an automatic campaign finds tell you what to add to the listing. Our Walmart SEO guide covers the ranking side in more depth; this post is about finding and using the words.

How Walmart Search Differs From Amazon's

Most brands we work with arrive on Walmart with an Amazon keyword list, and about half of it transfers. The other half needs rework, because the two search engines and their ad platforms behave differently. Our Walmart vs Amazon comparison covers the wider differences.

Three differences matter most in practice.

Walmart gives you a rank, not a number. Its Search query report shows a Frequency Rank: "Rank 500 indicates that the phrase is the 500th most popular query on Walmart in the selected time range," per Walmart's Search query report guide. Any tool that shows a Walmart "monthly search volume" is estimating it.

Product type matters as much as words. In the same guide, Walmart's advice for better search performance is to follow Listing Quality recommendations and check that your assigned product type is correct. A keyword in the title rarely rescues an item filed under the wrong product type.

The Buy Box gates the ads. Sponsored Products only serve on items that are in stock, published and winning the Walmart Buy Box. Keyword research for an item that keeps losing the Buy Box is wasted effort until the offer is fixed.

Shoppers also search differently. Walmart sells groceries and household staples next to general merchandise, and in the accounts we manage, Walmart queries skew shorter and more practical: size, count and pack terms like "32 oz" or "family size" matter more than lifestyle phrases.

Walmart's Own Keyword Tools in 2026

Walmart now has native keyword data in two places: Seller Center for organic search and the Walmart Connect Ad Center for ads. Use both before you pay for anything else.

1. Search Insights in Seller Center

Search Insights sits under Analytics in Seller Center. Walmart's Search Insights overview, last updated August 7, 2026, lists three reports plus an API:

• Catalog performance report: item-level search impressions, clicks, add-to-carts and sales, with each item's rank within its product type.

• Search query report: the customer queries that bring traffic to one item, for a month or a calendar week, with Frequency Rank, your impression, click and add-to-cart share, the number of competing products and the top clicked product.

• Related keyword report: enter a phrase and get related customer searches with Frequency Rank, top clicked products and competitive benchmarks, per the Related keyword report guide (updated October 21, 2026).

Some reports only appear for sellers who meet eligibility rules Walmart does not spell out. If yours is missing, it may not be live for your account yet.

The Search query report is the most useful keyword file Walmart offers. Sort by Frequency Rank, then look for queries where your impression share is high but your click share is low: those are listings that show up and lose the click, usually on title, image or price.

2. Item Keyword Performance Report (Ad Center)

The Item Keyword Performance report shows which keywords your advertised items served against and how each one performed. It is available for both automatic and manual Sponsored Products campaigns, per Walmart's report availability table.

It is Walmart's closest equivalent to Amazon's search term report, and it is the file you harvest from. Walmart's own Sponsored Products best practices say to use it to see what keywords the algorithm serves your automatic ads against, then move them into manual campaigns.

Since June 2026 the report also carries in-store sales, units and orders, per the Sponsored Search release notes. Judge a keyword on online plus store sales, not online alone.

3. Keyword Performance and Search Term Impression Share

The Keyword Performance report covers the keywords you bid on in manual campaigns, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Videos. The Search Term Impression Share report shows how much of the available impressions you win on a search term.

Walmart's campaign optimization page recommends checking impression share for high-performing keywords and raising bids if your ads are not in the top four top-of-search placements. That same page points advertisers to the Keyword Performance report and the Keyword Planner to find new, high-volume search terms.

4. Keyword Recommendations and Suggested Bids

For manual campaigns, Walmart recommends up to 40 keywords per ad group, refreshed daily from a 30-day lookback, once the ad group has run for at least three days, per its keyword recommendations documentation.

Suggested bids now cover each match type, and since August 2026 they extend to keywords already in your campaigns, not only new ones. Treat both as a starting point. They tell you what Walmart can serve, not what will be profitable for your margin.

5. The Walmart.com Search Bar

Type your core product noun into the Walmart.com search bar and note every autocomplete suggestion, then add a letter (a, b, c) after it and repeat. It costs nothing and shows the modifiers shoppers actually use.

Check the results page too. The products that rank, their titles and the filters Walmart shows (size, color, count) tell you which attributes Walmart considers relevant for that query.

How to Do Walmart Keyword Research: 6 Steps

This is the process we run for a new item or a new Walmart account. It takes a few hours for the research and three to four weeks for the first round of ad data.

1. Build a Seed List From the Product Itself

Write down the product type, the core noun shoppers use, and every attribute that would appear in a search: size, count, material, color, use, audience. For an insulated water bottle that is "water bottle", "insulated", "stainless steel", "32 oz", "straw lid", "leak proof".

Add your brand name and the two or three brands shoppers compare you with. Branded queries need their own plan, as we cover below.

2. Expand With Walmart's Own Data

Run each seed through the search bar and the Related keyword report. If the item already sells, pull its Search query report for the last full month to see which queries already bring it traffic.

You will end up with 50 to 200 phrases for a typical item. That is enough; a longer list mostly adds noise.

3. Prioritize by Popularity, Relevance and Intent

Sort the list into three tiers. Tier 1 is highly relevant and popular (a low Frequency Rank number).

Tier 2 is highly relevant but less searched, usually long-tail phrases with three or more words. Tier 3 is loosely related, and it goes into ads only, with low bids.

Relevance beats popularity. A query with a great Frequency Rank that describes a different product (kids' bottles when you sell 32 oz adult bottles) will show your item to people who will not buy it, and Walmart's auction charges more for low relevance.

4. Map Keywords to the Listing

Walmart's keyword optimization guide (updated April 14, 2026) says keywords can go in the title, description and key features. It recommends one or two primary keywords, used once in each, and warns against repeated words, irrelevant terms and titles over 200 characters.

Fill the item's attributes completely and accurately as well. Walmart's filters and search results use them, and a missing "capacity" attribute can keep a "32 oz" item out of a filtered search. Our Walmart listing optimization guide covers the content rules field by field.

5. Launch an Automatic Campaign on Fixed Bidding

Your research is a hypothesis. The automatic campaign tests it with real shoppers. Start one automatic Sponsored Products campaign on your strongest items, on fixed bidding, so you can add negatives later.

Run it for two to four weeks. Walmart matches the campaign to searches and pages based on your listing content, which is why step 4 comes first. Our guide to Walmart Sponsored Products placements explains where those ads appear.

6. Harvest, Negate and Repeat

Every two weeks, pull the Item Keyword Performance report. Move the winners into manual campaigns, negate the waste, and add new converting phrases to the listing where they fit naturally. The sections below cover each move.

Walmart Match Types and When to Use Each

Walmart Sponsored Products manual campaigns take three match types: exact, phrase and broad. Keyword bids start at $0.30 and are capped at $100, per Walmart's keyword API documentation; automatic campaigns start at $0.20.

Walmart's own best practices say to bid highest on exact match for shoppers searching with intent, and to use broad match to find longer queries that contain your words. That matches what we see: exact keywords usually carry our best return on ad spend (ROAS), broad ones our cheapest discovery.

If you know Amazon's match types, the logic is the same. The difference is scale: Walmart traffic is smaller, so splitting one keyword across three match types in separate ad groups can leave each with too little data. We usually start with phrase and exact only for Tier 1, and add broad later.

Negative Keywords on Walmart (Since July 2026)

Walmart Connect launched negative keywords for Sponsored Products on July 29, 2026. Before that, the only way to stop a wasteful search on Walmart was to lower the bid on everything around it.

The rules, from Walmart's negative keyword documentation:

1. Two match types. Negative exact blocks a query that exactly matches the keyword. Negative phrase blocks any query containing the full phrase in the same order, so "running shoes" also blocks "white running shoes".

2. Fixed bidding only. Negatives work in manual campaigns and in automatic campaigns that use fixed bidding. They are not supported with dynamic bidding or Target ROAS (see our Walmart bidding strategies guide).

3. Switching strategy removes them. Move a campaign to a strategy that does not support negatives and Walmart removes them automatically. Move it back and Walmart attempts to restore them.

4. Limits. Up to 500 negatives per ad group across both match types, 80 characters each. Negatives are not reviewed.

There is no negative broad match, and no negative product or brand targeting in Sponsored Products. Use negative phrase for a single irrelevant word ("kids", "glass") and negative exact for a specific query you want to stop without blocking its longer variants.

Modern Retail noted that Amazon has offered negative keywords for years. Our negative keywords guide explains the thresholds we use there, and they carry over, adjusted for Walmart's lower traffic.

How to Harvest Keywords on Walmart

Harvesting is moving a search term that converts from an automatic or broad campaign into a manual exact or phrase campaign, where you control its bid. On Walmart it finally works the same way as on Amazon, because you can now negate the harvested term at the source.

These are the thresholds we start with on Walmart, over a 14 to 30 day window. Change them to your margin and conversion rate.

• Harvest to exact: 2 or more orders and ROAS at or above your break-even ROAS.

• Harvest to phrase, lower bid: 1 order, or ROAS close to break-even on a relevant query whose wording varies.

• Negate: clicks of about twice the number you normally need for one order, and no orders. At an 8% conversion rate that is around 25 to 30 clicks.

• Wait: anything with fewer clicks than that. Small samples lie, and Walmart samples are small.

When you harvest a term to exact, add it as a negative exact in the automatic campaign it came from. Otherwise both campaigns bid on the same search and you lose control of which bid wins.

Remember Walmart's longer attribution. Sponsored Search reports offer 3, 14 and 30 day windows, including in-store sales, so a term that looks dead at 3 days can convert by day 14. Our Walmart Connect guide covers the reporting windows.

Worked Example: Harvesting a Water Bottle Campaign

Here is a typical first harvest, with illustrative numbers. The item is a 32 oz insulated water bottle at $24.99. After product, fees and shipping, the margin before ads is $9.00, so break-even ROAS is 24.99 ÷ 9.00 = 2.78 (an ACOS of 36%).

The automatic campaign ran on fixed bidding for 21 days. These five queries came from its Item Keyword Performance report.

Together these terms spent $271.95 for $574.77 in sales, a ROAS of 2.11: below break-even. Negating the last three removes $98.60 of spend and $24.99 of sales.

The same traffic would then have returned $549.78 on $173.35, a ROAS of 3.17. The two harvested terms go into a manual campaign at their own bids, and both also go into the automatic campaign as negative exact.

One more step: "straw lid" was converting but missing from the title. It went into the key features, and the next Search query report is where you check whether the item starts earning organic impressions on it.

The competitor term deserves a note. Conquesting a rival's brand can work, but it needs its own campaign, its own budget and a lower ROAS target that you set on purpose. Mixed into an automatic campaign, it just drags the average down.

Branded Keywords: Defend Your Own Name

Since June 2025, competitor ads can serve in positions 1 and 2 of search results for branded keywords, per Walmart's release notes. If you do not bid on your own brand, someone else can take the top of the page when shoppers search for you.

Run your brand terms in a separate manual exact campaign with Sponsored Products, and add Sponsored Brands if you are on Walmart Brand Portal. Keep brand spend out of your prospecting ROAS: branded searches convert well, and blending them in hides weak non-branded keywords.

What Changed in Walmart Keyword Research in 2025 and 2026

Search is also moving beyond the search bar. Walmart's AI shopping assistant, Sparky, answers conversational questions in the app, and Walmart Connect's CES 2026 recap says it is reshaping how customers search and discover products. The listing content you write for keywords is the same content an assistant reads, so complete attributes and plain descriptions matter more each year.

Mistakes We See in Walmart Keyword Research

• Copying an Amazon keyword list unchanged. Amazon backend search terms have no hidden-field equivalent in Walmart's keyword guide, and Walmart queries skew toward size and pack terms.

• Treating tool estimates as Walmart volume. Walmart publishes a Frequency Rank. Third-party "volume" numbers for Walmart are models.

• Stuffing titles. Walmart's guide flags repeated words and titles over 200 characters. Stuffed titles also read badly on a phone.

• Switching to dynamic bidding with negatives in place. Walmart removes the negatives on the switch, and the waste comes back without warning.

• Negating on three-day data. Walmart's attribution runs to 14 and 30 days, including store sales. Wait for the window before cutting a relevant term.

• Researching keywords for an item that cannot win the Buy Box. No Buy Box, no ads, and weaker organic ranking too.

How We Run Walmart Keyword Research in Adbrew

Everything above can be done in Seller Center, the Ad Center and a spreadsheet. On one item it is an afternoon. Across a catalog, two marketplaces and several brands, the harvesting and negating alone becomes a weekly job.

Adbrew is an agentic retail media management platform for Amazon and Walmart, and Walmart Connect runs inside it next to Amazon Ads:

• Rules you control. Set rules for harvesting, negation, bids and budgets on the thresholds you choose, with the same governed logic you use on Amazon. Our guide to Walmart automated rules shows how rules are built.

• Bulk actions. Add keywords, change bids and states, and launch campaigns across hundreds of ad groups at once.

• Adbrew Intelligence. Ask "which Walmart search terms spent more than $30 with no orders in the last 30 days?" and the agent finds them and drafts the changes for you to approve.

• Adbrew MCP. Work your Walmart Connect account from Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor, with every change applied only after approval.

Once search runs profitably, the same audiences can go further through Walmart DSP. More than 5,000 brands, agencies and aggregators use Adbrew, and the platform has been recognized at Walmart Connect.

Start With Walmart's Data, Not a Tool

Walmart keyword research in 2026 starts inside Walmart: Search Insights for demand, an automatic campaign for proof, and negatives to keep the waste out. Sellers who are still setting up can begin with our guide on how to sell on Walmart.

Want harvesting, negatives and bids handled on rules you set, across Walmart and Amazon? Book a demo with our team and we'll walk through your Walmart account.