The death certificate for SEO keywords
(my 15-year career just ended)
Well, I finally did it. After 15 years of preaching keyword research and generating 5+ million signups for startups, I'm officially throwing in the towel on traditional SEO keyword research.
Keywords died the moment people stopped typing "best marketing strategy" and started asking:
"What's the best marketing strategy for Eastern European marketers who need to sell to the US market?"
See the difference?
We went from robot-speak to actual human questions.
And guess what happens when you ask AI that question?
You get a direct answer. No clicking through 10 blog posts that all say the same thing.
The search landscape looks nothing like 2020
Here's where I'm actually searching for answers and solutions these days (and I know I’m not the only one):
YouTube for tutorials (because who reads anymore?)
Reddit for honest opinions (adding "+ reddit" to every search)
TikTok for quick how-tos (yes, even I'm guilty of this)
Voice search on my phone while driving
Perplexity when I want AI to do the thinking for me
Google?
Still there, but it's just one player in a much bigger game now.
Why marketers got addicted to keywords in the first place
Simple: Numbers make marketers feel smart and it’s easier to prove that your work has value to the upper management.
We could track everything:
Search volume: 5,400 monthly searches ✓
Keyword difficulty: 45/100 ✓
Click-through rates: 3.2% ✓
Those metrics made our bosses happy and our reports look professional.
But keywords were always just a proxy metric – a way to measure something that actually mattered (traffic, conversions, revenue).
We mistook the map for the territory.
What replaces this mess?
I won't lie to you – I'm figuring this out as I go. But here's what I'm seeing work:
✅ Topical authority (the real kind, not the SEO buzzword version) across multiple channels. You need to be the person/brand people think of when they have a problem in your space.
✅ User intent mapping still matters. Where are your customers when they need you? What format do they want? Video? Thread? Podcast?
✅ Multi-channel content creation because your audience is scattered across platforms like leaves in the wind.
The uncomfortable truth - attribution gets EVEN worse
Attribution is about to become a nightmare.
ROI tracking? Good luck with that.
We're going back to the dark ages of "half my advertising works, I just don't know which half."
You'll need to rely more on gut feeling and experience than spreadsheets full of keyword data.
I know that makes the data nerds (myself included) very uncomfortable.
My confession
I canceled my SEMrush subscription a while ago. If you're still paying for keyword tools in 2025, you're basically paying for a museum ticket to see how we used to do marketing.
Time to adapt or get left behind.
P.S. If you want to figure out this new world with me, I'm building AI workflows that actually matter at aimarketingmasters.com.
Less busy work, more strategy.
P.P.S. What are you doing to adapt? Hit reply and tell me. I'm collecting stories for my next deep dive.