I hear this a lot, and honestly, it comes down to how you're setting up your data feeds. Most people treat keyword research tools like a black box-throw in a seed term, grab the output, and wonder why they're drowning in irrelevant junk. That's not using it; that's just scraping the surface.
For example, if you're relying on something like Moz or SEMrush out-of-the-box without segmenting by intent, you're going to get a garbage fire of informational queries mixed with commercial ones. The trick is to build your own filtering layer-I usually pop the export into a Python script or a Google Sheet with regex to split by keyword modifier (e.g., "buy", "review", "best", "how to"). Then you layer on search volume thresholds and competition indices before you even look at the list.
Also, if you're not leveraging the API to pull monthly trends over at least 12 months, you're missing the seasonality signal entirely. That alone changes which terms are actually worth targeting. A tool is only as good as the workflow you wrap around it. So yeah, if it feels broken, it's probably your process, not the platform.
