The Difficulty score

What it measures

When a teacher searches a phrase on TPT, they see a certain number of competing resources. Difficulty ranks that supply against every other keyword we track: a score of 20 means this keyword has less competition than about 80% of all keywords; a score of 90 means it's more crowded than 90% of them.

Because it's a percentile, not a raw count, it stays meaningful across niches: 3,000 competitors might be "low" for a math keyword and "high" for a niche holiday craft — Difficulty already accounts for that by comparing against the whole market.

How to read it

What it does NOT tell you

Difficulty says nothing about demand. A keyword can be beautifully uncrowded because nobody searches it. That's why Difficulty is always shown next to Popularity (demand) and combined into the Opportunity score — low Difficulty is only interesting when demand is real.

Where the number comes from

Every night we record the competing-resource count for every keyword in our database, straight from TPT's public search systems. The score is recomputed nightly from that fresh snapshot, so a sudden flood of new resources into a niche shows up in the score within a day.

Honest limits: Difficulty measures how many resources compete, not how good they are. A keyword with 50 weak listings is easier than the same count of polished ones — that's exactly what the Product Explorer's quality scores are for. Use Difficulty to shortlist, Product Explorer to confirm.