With AI-powered Search on the Rise, Do Keywords Matter Anymore?

Keywords have long been a focus of any serious content marketing strategy for financial advisors. Producing keyword-centered content is a proven method of getting your content to rank in the right search results.

Then AI went and turned the whole world crazy. People are freaking out about Google’s AI summaries and ChatGPT answers replacing organic search traffic to their site. Marketing thought leaders are out here talking nonsense about “A.I. GOOD, KEYWORDS BAD” like they didn’t just learn how to use ChatGPT themselves. It’s madness.

Let’s all take a deep breath and just think about this for a second, okay?

First of all, if anyone tells you to stop doing something that has been effective for over a decade and totally pivot to something that no one fully understands yet, you can safely ignore them.

Marketing trends come and go. Every time a new one comes along, “thought leaders” take to the rooftops to shout about how this is the new big thing, it’s the most effective thing, if you don’t do this thing you’ll be left behind, and, finally, that the previous big thing is now dead.

Marketers never met a trend they didn’t like, and despite a spotty track record of short-lived trends that turned out to not actually be the next big thing, they continue to offer unsolicited advice that can easily throw you off-course.

AI AIn’t just a trend

Now, AI is obviously more than a marketing trend and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. According to a February 2025 survey, 20% of people say they prefer using AI for search to traditional search engines like Google or Bing, and that number is likely to keep rising for a while. In addition, lots of website admins report seeing traffic from AI results.

But it’s not all good. AI overviews in Google have cut organic traffic to websites by as much as 60%.

Zero-click content has been steadily chipping away at the traffic Google sends to websites ever since they introduced the Featured Snippet, which highlighted text from a search result in order to provide the answer without requiring the searcher to click through to the website.

Google’s AI Overview has taken it a step further, giving a more fleshed-out AI-generated answer to queries than ever before. Basically, Google takes the information from the websites it crawls and presents it to searchers, robbing the subject matter experts of any traffic or recognition.

People are pretty upset that the marketing strategy they’ve built their entire digital presence around is suddenly being disrupted, and Google’s answer seems to boil down to, “You win some, you lose some.”

Still, AI is worth understanding, if for no other reason than to better know how people can find your firm online.

But does that mean you should throw keywords out the window and go all-in on AI-search?

Keywords still matter

Yes, keywords matter. Continue to focus on them.

A keyword-focused strategy is a human-centered strategy, and humanity will win every time. If you build things for bots, you’ll repel humans.

The AI-centric approach basically says, “Give up control over your messaging and trust the bots to handle everything.”

Hard pass.

I’m more convinced now than ever that people just won’t put up with that for very long. We like talking to humans, we like reading things written by humans, we like working with humans.

But we hate dealing with robots. I can’t count the number of times I’ve yelled at or hung up on robots when they wouldn’t connect me with a human. We will tolerate bots if it makes our lives easier, but the minute it makes things harder for us, we’re done.

Now imagine going to a website created for bots or reading a blog post written with bots in mind. You see the problem, right?

So what should you do?

I suggest three things:

1. Keep on doing keywords

Keep doing keywords. Keep doing good content strategy.

These bots were built to scrape websites built by humans, and they will continue to do so. It’s not like they’re going to get confused and skip over your website entirely if it’s not built to their exact specifications.

If you scratch the surface of this new AI-centric advice, you find that much of it is not all that revolutionary. “Summarize clearly,” “Use CAPTCHA.”

If you’re looking for the AI Revolution, this ain’t it.

2. Invest in email

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Email is the only marketing channel you own, so you should give it the most attention. Build your list, engage your list, repeat!

If you need help getting started, click here to check out our collection of 52 email prompts for financial advisors.

3. Make sure your content is good

The #1 contributing factor to content that really works isn’t AI or SEO or keywords, it’s this:

It resonates with people. Create content that is good, well-written, engaging, and you’ll win eventually.

When we build stuff made for bots, we contribute to the decline of digital civilization. Everything will get worse because bots are built on human information.

Eventually, they’ll just start eating themselves and the internet will become an unwieldy, awful place (more than it is already). And no one wants that.

Want help making good, well-written, engaging, winning content?

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