Most keyword lists are too long. A keyword tool hands you 400 ideas, a spreadsheet sorts them by volume, and the team starts writing from the top. A few months later, the posts rank for things nobody buys from, or don't rank at all.
The problem usually isn't finding keywords. It's choosing between them. And AI search adds a new wrinkle, because for some searches Google now answers the question itself before anyone clicks.
This guide gives you a simple way to choose keywords for SEO when buyers also ask AI. It's a five-factor scorecard you can copy, with a worked example, for deciding what to write next.
Why volume alone picks the wrong keywords
Sorting by search volume feels logical. More searches, more traffic. But volume ignores three things that decide whether a keyword pays off.
- Whether the searcher could ever buy from you.
- Whether your site can realistically rank for it.
- Whether Google's AI Overview leaves anything for a page to add.
That third one is new, and it's bigger than it sounds. Ahrefs looked at 146 million desktop search results from September 2025, in a study by Ryan Law published November 10, 2025. It found that "AI Overviews appear on 20.5% of all SERPs," and far more often on some kinds of search than others.
| Kind of search | Share with an AI Overview |
|---|---|
| Question-style searches | 57.9% |
| One-word searches | 9.5% |
| 3-word searches | 14.0% |
| 5-word searches | 27.6% |
| 7 or more words | 46.4% |
Ahrefs also found that 99.9% of keywords that trigger AI Overviews are informational, and that overviews are 1.9 times more common for non-branded keywords than branded ones. The long, question-shaped searches many content plans chase are exactly the ones Google most often answers itself.
Your competitors are getting cited by AI. You're not.
Every day without citation tracking is a day your competitors pull ahead in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude.
Do the keyword tools account for this?
Not yet. On October 19, 2026, we checked the keyword difficulty and keyword research guides published by Semrush, Ahrefs and Backlinko. None of them treats "does an AI Overview already answer this?" as a factor when choosing which keywords to target. Backlinko's guide mentions tracking how a brand appears in AI answers, but not as part of choosing keywords up front. Moz's page wouldn't load for our check.
So you'll have to add that factor yourself. The scorecard below does.
The five-factor scorecard
Score each keyword from 1 to 3 on five factors, then add them up. The highest totals get written first.
| Factor | 1 point | 2 points | 3 points |
|---|---|---|---|
| Relevance | Loosely related to what you sell | Related to a problem you solve | Directly about your product or service |
| Intent | Learning, far from buying | Comparing options | Ready to choose or buy |
| Winnability | Top results are far stronger sites | A mix of strong and smaller sites | Smaller sites or forums rank |
| Business value | A visitor is worth little to you | Some value, like a newsletter signup | Could lead straight to a sale or demo |
| Answer gap | An AI Overview fully answers it | An AI Overview covers the basics | No overview, or the question needs depth |
A perfect score is 15. In practice, anything at 11 or above is worth writing soon, 8 to 10 is worth a place on the list, and below 8 can usually wait.
We call the last factor the answer gap: how much is left for a page to add after Google's AI Overview has answered. A short factual question with a complete overview has almost no gap. A question that needs a comparison, a walkthrough or a product recommendation has a big one.
How to score each factor
Relevance
Ask whether someone searching this keyword could become a customer. "Best scheduling software for dental clinics" is highly relevant for a dental scheduling tool. "How to brush your teeth properly" isn't, even though it's dental.
Intent
Read the keyword as a sentence and ask what the person is trying to do. Learning terms like "what is" and "how does" score lower. Comparison terms like "best," "vs" and "alternatives" score higher. Terms like "pricing," "demo" or a product name score highest. Our guide to the types of keywords covers intent in more depth.
Winnability
Search the keyword and look at who ranks. If every result is a huge brand with years of links, score it 1 for now, even if it's perfect otherwise. If smaller sites, forum threads or thin pages rank, score it 3. Our guide to SERP analysis shows what to look for.
Winnability is about your site, not the keyword's difficulty score. A keyword that's hard for a new site might be easy for one with years of relevant content. A post on r/SEO that drew more than 300 upvotes made this point well. The poster said it finally clicked that each keyword you rank for places you in a topic, and Google rewards the authority you build across that topic, not any one page alone.
A Few Things That Finally Clicked About Authority, Topics, and How Google Actually Ranks Pages
I’ve been lurking here for a while, and the discussions have been more useful than most courses or blog posts, so I wanted to share a few things I’ve learned by simply paying attention. None of this is theory-crafting. It’s just pattern-mat...
That's why narrow keywords inside your main topic often score higher than broad ones. Each one you win makes the next one easier.
200+ SaaS teams already track their AI citations.
They know exactly when ChatGPT mentions their brand, and when it stops. Do you?
Business value
Estimate what a visitor from this keyword is worth. A search that could lead to a demo request is worth more than one that leads to a blog read. If you know your numbers, use them. If not, a rough high, medium or low is enough.
Answer gap
Search the keyword and look at the top of the page. No AI Overview, score 3. An overview that covers the basics but leaves room for depth, examples or a recommendation, score 2. An overview that fully answers a simple question, score 1.
A low answer-gap score doesn't always mean skip it. Pages that rank well are still the ones AI Overviews tend to link to. But it does mean that keyword is less likely to send many clicks, so it shouldn't sit at the top of your list on volume alone.
A worked example
Here's the scorecard applied to five made-up keywords for a scheduling tool aimed at dental clinics.
| Keyword | Relevance | Intent | Winnability | Value | Answer gap | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| dental scheduling software pricing | 3 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 14 |
| best scheduling software for dental clinics | 3 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 13 |
| how to reduce no-shows at a dental practice | 2 | 1 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 10 |
| what is practice management software | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 6 |
| scheduling software | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 10 |
The two buyer keywords win easily, even though they probably have the lowest search volume on the list. The no-show question is a solid supporting article. "Scheduling software" has the most volume, but it's too broad to win and too general to convert, so it waits. The definition question scores lowest, because it's broad, far from buying and the kind of thing an AI Overview answers in two lines.
What to do with small teams and hard keywords
If every keyword in your market is dominated by big sites, the scorecard will show it, with low winnability everywhere. That's useful information, not a dead end.
A post on r/seogrowth from a two-person marketing team at a 30-person fintech company asked exactly this. Every relevant keyword, like "credit card" and "loan," was as hard as keywords get. The top reply suggested skipping the broad terms and going after long-tail versions and the questions people ask, while keeping AI Overviews in mind. Our guide to finding long tail keywords walks through that with real data.
How can I rank difficult keywords for my SEO?
I own a fintech company. All of our keywords are difficult..."credit card", "loan", "financial software"...you get the idea lol. We are a smaller company of 30 in-house employees and our marketing team is currently two people. Neither are s...
That's the right move. Narrow the keyword until winnability scores at least a 2, then build out from there.
Keywords and AI chats
Buyers also ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, and they ask differently. Prompts tend to be longer and more personal than keywords, with the buyer's situation built in. But they're usually about the same topics.
So the scorecard still works. The keywords that score well are often the topics buyers ask AI about too. Write pages that answer those topics clearly, and you're covering both. Our post on moving from keyword research to prompt research goes deeper on how prompts differ, and our analysis of why keyword tools miss AI demand covers what volume numbers can't see.
A quick routine
- Pull 30 to 50 candidate keywords from your tools and Search Console.
- Drop anything with a relevance score of 1.
- Score the rest on all five factors.
- Write the top five first.
- Re-score the list every quarter, because rankings, competitors and AI Overviews change.
For a store, our guide to ecommerce keyword research shows how to build the candidate list in the first place.
Doing it yourself or handing it off
Scoring 40 keywords takes an afternoon. Writing the articles they point to takes much longer.
You can run the scorecard yourself every quarter. RankControl does the planning for you. We find the questions your buyers search, plan titles around them and write each article against the pages already ranking for its keyword. We publish to your site, and our AI visibility tracking checks up to 50 buyer questions every week across seven AI engines. Expect traffic from Google first, with AI citations following more slowly as links and mentions build up.
How often does ChatGPT mention your brand?
Most founders have no idea. The answer might surprise you.
