Demand sub-score
The Demand sub-score answers “how many people want this product?” — on a 0–100 scale.
In this guide:
- The preferred input (SFR)
- The fallback (BSR + Trends)
- Reading the score
- When SFR is unavailable
The preferred input: Search Frequency Rank (SFR)
Amazon’s Brand Analytics exposes a per-keyword Search Frequency Rank — basically a ranking of how often a keyword is searched in a given marketplace. Lower number = more popular.
When Hilal can fetch SFR for the product’s primary keywords, demand is computed from that. SFR is the gold-standard demand signal because it’s Amazon’s own first-party data.
Catch: SFR is only available to Brand-Registered sellers in eligible marketplaces. If your account isn’t Brand Registered, Hilal can still use SFR for Hilal’s lookups (we have access via the upstream pipeline) — but the data sometimes lags.
The fallback: BSR + Google Trends
When SFR isn’t available for a product, Hilal falls back to:
- Best Sellers Rank (BSR) — Amazon’s category-level rank, public and always available.
- Google Trends 12-month interest — public search-engine demand for the keyword.
Combined, these proxy SFR reasonably well for products with consistent keyword-to-product mapping. Less well for niche products where the keyword is unusual.
When fallback is used, the data-quality badge on the row warns you. → Data quality
Reading the score
| Score | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 80–100 | Top-tier demand. SFR rank in the top X% (or BSR top thousand) for the marketplace. |
| 60–79 | Good demand. Reliable, if not viral. |
| 40–59 | Moderate. Sells, but not a high-velocity product. |
| 20–39 | Low demand. Niche product or geographically limited interest. |
| 0–19 | Very low demand. Likely too narrow to be commercially interesting. |
When SFR is unavailable
Common reasons:
- Marketplace doesn’t support SFR. Brand Analytics availability varies by marketplace and may be temporarily down.
- Keyword wasn’t a primary keyword. SFR is per-keyword; if the product’s main keyword isn’t a high-traffic term, SFR may not return data.
- API outage. Brand Analytics has occasional outages; Hilal falls back automatically.
In all of these, the demand sub-score uses BSR + Trends and the data-quality badge marks the row.
Why demand is the highest-weighted sub-score
Default weight: 25% — the highest of any sub-score. Reason: a product without demand is by definition not a product worth selling, regardless of how good its margin or how thin the competition. The weight reflects that demand is the necessary (not sufficient) condition for a product to be worth your time.