Keywords and matching

Conditions decide whether the words someone wrote are a match. There are three match modes and two keyword lists.

The three match modes

Mode	Matches when	Example with the keyword price
Any	Always. Keywords are ignored.	Every comment matches.
Contains	The keyword appears anywhere in what they wrote.	"what is the price?" matches. "PRICE" matches.
Exact	What they wrote is the keyword, and nothing else.	"price" matches. "what is the price?" does not.

Exact means the whole message

This is the single most common misunderstanding. Exact is not "the exact word somewhere in the sentence" - it means the entire comment is that word. If you want to catch people who mention a word in a sentence, you want Contains.

Capital letters do not matter

Matching ignores case, so price, Price and PRICE are all the same.

Include and exclude

• Include keywords are what you are looking for. Any one of them matching is enough.
• Exclude keywords are what disqualifies a match. If any of them appears, the automation does not answer, whatever the match mode says.

Exclusions win. They are checked first and they override everything, including a match mode set to Any. Use them to keep an automation away from comments it would embarrass you on.

An example

Include price, cost. Exclude free. A comment reading "what is the price?" is answered. One reading "is it free?" is not, and neither is "what is the price, is there a free trial?" - because the exclusion applies to the whole comment.

Keywords are not the whole story

Two automations with completely different keywords can still both match one comment, because a comment can contain both sets of words. This is why only one automation replies.