Intent

In NLP and conversational AI, intent refers to what a user actually wants to accomplish—distinct from the literal words used. Intent classification is the task of mapping user utterances to predefined categories like "book a flight," "check weather," or "cancel subscription."

Search engines and AI answer engines must accurately interpret query intent to return relevant results. Misidentifying intent—returning informational content for a transactional query—is a leading cause of poor AI search performance.