How do you infer intent when there are no UTMs?

There are still useful intent signals even without UTMs. Some of the main ones are other query params, geography, locale, device type, referrer, and IP-enrichment-based signals when available. Query params can include UTMs, but they do not have to. They can also be custom parameters already passed through your acquisition flow.

For paid search specifically, Google Ads can pass the matched keyword via tracking parameters such as utm_term={keyword}. This is the matched keyword Google triggered the ad on, not the raw user search query. Google provides the matching keyword for the user's query. We can help configure this for your Google Ads if not set up already. That is much cleaner and more reliable than trying to infer it indirectly.