Abstract: Systems, methods, and computer-readable storage media for predicting user interest, and more specifically to defining user interest based on user expressions of intent. The system can receive a list of items, where each item in the list of items has a similar purpose and can be substituted with other items in the list of items, and item content elements associated with items in the list. The system can then identify websites with content that is relevant to the item content elements associated with the list based on relevancy, and identify at least one user that accessed one of the websites, resulting in at least one interested user. The system can then generate, for each user in the set of at least one interested users, a user intent and modify a previously planned interaction with the each user based on the user intent score.