Keyword rankings have been a central part of SEO reporting for many years. They gave businesses a relatively straightforward measure of search visibility: if an important keyword moved from page two to page one, or from position eight to position three, that was generally considered evidence of progress.
That principle has not disappeared. What has changed is the search journey around it.
Search is increasingly influenced by AI Overviews, AI Mode, conversational search and platforms such as ChatGPT. A search that once consisted of somebody typing a short phrase into Google and choosing from ten blue links can now develop into a much longer conversation involving follow-up questions, comparisons, recommendations and increasingly specific requirements. This has led some people to question whether traditional keyword tracking still matters. It does.
However, keyword rankings should increasingly be treated as indicators of visibility, relevance and intent, rather than absolute measures of search performance.
At the same time, SEO reporting needs to expand beyond rankings. Businesses should be looking at the search terms, questions and prompts associated with their products and services, how those searches develop, and whether they are becoming visible across both traditional search engines and AI-driven discovery.
In other words, the future of reporting is not keywords versus prompts. It is understanding how keywords, search intent, prompts and AI visibility fit together.
Traditional keyword rankings still matter
A traditional organic ranking remains useful because it tells us something important: a search engine considers a page relevant to a particular query.
Tracking rankings over time can therefore provide useful indicators of whether important pages are gaining or losing visibility, whether competitors are becoming more prominent and whether work carried out on a website appears to be strengthening its relevance within a particular subject area.
The mistake is assuming that the ranking itself is the final objective. A position of three rather than six is interesting.
What matters more is what the search represents:
- Does the phrase indicate somebody researching a subject?
- Are they comparing possible solutions?
- Are they actively looking for a company to provide a service?
- Are they looking for a particular product?
- Are they searching within a specific location?
Those distinctions have always mattered in SEO, but they become even more important as search becomes conversational.
Search intent is more important than the headline keyword
One of the weaknesses of traditional keyword reporting is the tendency to focus heavily on broad, high-volume phrases. Those phrases can be useful indicators of topical visibility, but they frequently represent informational rather than commercial intent. Consider a B2B company operating within a particular specialist field.
Its main industry phrase might generate substantial search volume, but searches containing modifiers such as:
- service
- services
- company
- companies
- agency
- consultant
- provider
- specialist
- supplier
- cost
- pricing
- near me
- a town, city or region
may tell us much more about the commercial opportunity.
For a B2C business, the pattern may be different. Product names, product categories, models, features, prices and locations may be far more significant. Searches might include terms such as “buy”, “best”, “price”, “in stock”, a particular product attribute or a geographic location.
The exact terminology therefore depends on the business. What matters is the intent behind the search. A useful keyword strategy should consequently include a mixture of broader topical phrases and more commercially significant searches. Reporting only on the largest headline terms risks overlooking the queries that are much closer to an enquiry, purchase or other conversion.
Keywords are increasingly the beginning of a conversation
This is where traditional SEO and Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) increasingly overlap.
A user might begin with a relatively conventional Google search such as:
‘commercial solar panels’
But that initial search could develop into:
‘commercial solar panel installers’
Then:
‘commercial solar panel installers in Glasgow’
And subsequently:
‘which commercial solar panel companies in Glasgow work with warehouses?’
Within an AI environment such as ChatGPT or Google’s AI experiences, the journey can become even more conversational:
‘Which companies would be suitable for a 50,000 sq ft distribution centre?’
‘What should I ask them before requesting a quote?’
‘Compare the main options based on experience, accreditations and likely project suitability.’
The original keyword has not necessarily disappeared. It has become the starting point for a much richer sequence of questions. This is one reason abandoning keyword research or rank tracking would be premature. Keywords still help us understand the subjects and commercial needs around which these conversations begin. What has changed is that we also need to understand where the conversation might go next.
SEO and AEO should not be treated as separate disciplines
Answer Engine Optimisation is sometimes discussed as though it has replaced SEO. In practice, there is considerable overlap. AI systems still need to understand entities, topics, products, services, expertise and relationships between information. Search engines also need to determine whether a website or page is relevant and useful for a particular question. Strong SEO foundations therefore remain important.
Clear website architecture, useful content, descriptive pages, internal linking, authority, technical accessibility and strong coverage of relevant subjects all contribute towards making a business understandable online.
AEO adds another consideration: can the information be understood and used as an answer?
That means considering the questions potential customers are likely to ask, the comparisons they may make, the details they need before making a decision and the follow-up questions that might occur during a conversational search journey.
The objective is not simply to “rank for a prompt”. It is to build sufficient relevance, clarity and authority around the underlying subject and intent that the business has a greater opportunity to surface when search engines or AI systems construct an answer.
From keywords to prompts
This also changes how keyword research itself should be approached.
Historically, a keyword list might contain variations such as:
- accountancy firm Glasgow
- accountants Glasgow
- business accountants Glasgow
- small business accountants Glasgow
Those searches are still useful.
But an AEO-aware approach might also investigate questions and prompts such as:
- Who are the best accountants for small businesses in Glasgow?
- Which Glasgow accountancy firms specialise in growing limited companies?
- What should I look for when choosing a business accountant?
- Compare accountants for a small company with 20 employees.
- Which accountants offer both tax planning and outsourced finance support?
These are not necessarily phrases that should each become individual website pages. Nor should they simply be inserted awkwardly into existing content.
Instead, they reveal the information, attributes, entities and decision criteria that users, and potentially AI systems need to understand. This makes prompt research useful for informing content strategy, service pages, product information, FAQs, comparison content, case studies and supporting resources.
Look at real search data, not just hypothetical prompts
There is a danger of AEO reporting becoming overly theoretical, it is relatively easy to create hundreds of possible prompts and then monitor whether a brand appears for them. The harder and more valuable question is whether those prompts reflect how real people are searching and what they actually want. This is why first-party search data remains so important.
Google Search Console can provide query, impression, click and landing-page data that helps identify the language people genuinely use to find a website. As Google continues to integrate AI experiences into Search, this data should be examined alongside the visibility and reporting Google makes available for AI-influenced search experiences.
Bing Webmaster Tools can provide another useful source of search performance and query information, particularly as Microsoft continues to connect conventional search with AI-powered experiences.
These sources can be combined with analytics, conversion data, internal site search, CRM information, customer enquiries and prompt-monitoring tools. The aim should be to connect actual search behaviour with likely conversational behaviour.
If Search Console repeatedly shows impressions for commercially relevant variations around a service, for example, those searches can provide the starting point for investigating the questions and prompts that may surround that intent. This is considerably more useful than producing a speculative list of AI prompts with no connection to real customer behaviour.
Group keywords and prompts by intent
A modern visibility report should move beyond a flat list of keywords, but that does not mean replacing a list of 100 keywords with 10,000 possible AI prompts. Conversational search creates an almost unlimited number of variations. A potential customer could ask the same underlying question in dozens or even hundreds of ways, adding different requirements, locations, company sizes, products, budgets or other details as the conversation develops. Attempting to predict and track every possible prompt is therefore neither practical nor particularly useful.
Instead, the starting point should remain the known topics and commercially important search intents associated with the business. These can then be expanded into logical groups based on the ways potential customers actually search for products, services and providers.
For example:
Topical / informational intent
- What is outsourced finance?
- Outsourced finance explained
- Benefits of outsourced finance
Commercial investigation
- Outsourced finance services
- Best outsourced finance companies
- Outsourced finance providers
- Outsourced finance agency
Service / transactional intent
- Outsourced finance company Glasgow
- Outsourced finance services for SMEs
- Hire outsourced finance team
- Outsourced finance pricing
These commercial variations are particularly important because they tell us much more about the underlying objective of the search than the main topical phrase alone. From there, we can recognise how the same intent might develop conversationally:
Conversational / AI discovery
- Which outsourced finance companies work with growing SMEs?
- What should I look for in an outsourced finance provider?
- Compare outsourced finance providers for a company with 50 employees.
The objective, however, is not to create an exhaustive list of every prompt somebody could conceivably enter into an AI platform. These examples are there to help us understand how an established commercial search intent could expand into a conversation. Reporting should remain grounded wherever possible in real search behaviour and available data.
Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools can help identify the queries, variations and longer searches for which a website is actually receiving visibility. This data can then be grouped according to the underlying intent rather than treating every slightly different phrase as a separate measure of performance.
A smaller number of representative prompts may also be useful for monitoring AI visibility, but they should be informed by these known topics and commercial search patterns rather than generated in their thousands simply because thousands of variations are possible.
This creates a more practical model:
Start with the core topic → identify commercially meaningful variations → group them by intent → use real search data to discover how that intent is being expressed → use representative prompts to understand how it may develop within conversational search.
The traditional ranking therefore remains useful as an indicator. Search question data shows how that visibility is expanding in the real world, while selected prompts can provide an additional indication of how the business appears within AI-driven discovery. The aim is not to track every possible way somebody could phrase a question. It is to understand whether the business is becoming more visible for the underlying intents that actually matter.
Rankings are indicators, not absolute measures
There is another reason rankings need to be interpreted differently. Search results are no longer uniform. A user may encounter organic listings alongside maps, products, videos, images, local results, AI Overviews and other search features. Results can also differ according to location, device, personal context and the exact wording of the question. AI-generated answers add another layer. A conventional rank-tracking platform might report that a website is in position three, but that does not necessarily mean every user sees the business as the third result in the same way.
This does not make rank tracking redundant, it makes rankings directional indicators. If a business is improving across an important cluster of commercial searches, that is useful evidence that its organic relevance and visibility are strengthening.
If rankings decline across an entire service area, that is an indicator that something deserves investigation. If a business performs strongly for informational searches but poorly for commercial searches, that can expose an important weakness in its SEO/AEO strategy. Rankings are therefore most valuable when they identify patterns rather than when individual positions are treated as absolute scores.
What should businesses track?
A modern SEO and AEO reporting framework should combine several different types of visibility data rather than attempting to find one metric that explains everything.
This can include:
- Rankings for strategically important keywords
- Ranking trends across keyword and intent groups
- Commercial versus informational search visibility
- Google Search Console queries, impressions and clicks
- Bing Webmaster Tools search data
- Organic landing-page performance
- Leads, enquiries, purchases and other conversions
- Visibility for important questions and conversational prompts
- AI citations, mentions or recommendations where these can be reliably monitored
- Competitor visibility across both search and AI environments
The emphasis should be on patterns.
- Are we becoming more visible for the services that generate revenue?
- Are we only visible at the informational stage?
- Are commercially important queries improving?
- Are people finding us through a wider range of relevant searches?
- Are our products, services and expertise being surfaced when AI systems answer questions associated with the buying journey?
- And, ultimately, is increased visibility contributing towards business results?
The commercial layer is crucial
One of the most important changes businesses can make to their reporting is to separate topical visibility from commercial visibility.
A company may appear to perform extremely well because it ranks for hundreds of informational searches around its industry. That is useful. Informational visibility can build awareness, demonstrate expertise and introduce potential customers to the business. But it is not the same as appearing when somebody is actively looking for a provider.
For B2B organisations, this means paying particular attention to service and supplier-oriented searches involving terms such as company, agency, provider, consultancy, specialist and relevant locations. For ecommerce and other B2C organisations, it may mean tracking specific product categories, models, attributes, prices, purchase modifiers and locations.
The principle is the same in both cases:
What would somebody search or ask when they are moving closer to making a commercial decision?
Those are the intents that deserve particular attention.
So, should we still track keywords?
Absolutely. The emergence of AI search does not mean keywords have suddenly stopped being useful. Keywords remain one of the clearest ways of monitoring whether a website is associated with the products, services, subjects and commercial needs that matter to a business. What needs to change is how that information is interpreted. A ranking should be treated as an indicator, not an absolute measure of success.
Keyword sets should be organised around intent, rather than selected purely because they have high search volume. Commercial phrases deserve particular attention because they can reveal whether a business is visible when potential customers are actually looking for products, services or providers and prompt research should increasingly sit alongside keyword research because search journeys are becoming conversational.
Conclusion: Track the intent, not just the position
SEO/AEO is not moving from a keyword world to a prompt world overnight. The two increasingly coexist. Someone may begin with a two or three-word Google search, encounter an AI Overview, continue through AI Mode or move into a conversational platform such as ChatGPT. Their next query may be significantly longer and more specific than the first but underneath that conversation remains something SEO has always attempted to understand:
Intent.
- What does this person actually want?
- What problem are they trying to solve?
- Are they researching, comparing or ready to buy?
- Which product, service, company or provider would satisfy that requirement?
Keyword rankings still provide valuable signals about whether a business is visible within that landscape. Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools provide evidence of how real searches are developing. Prompt and AI visibility monitoring can then add another layer by examining how those same needs are expressed through conversational search. The objective should therefore not be to replace keyword reporting with AI reporting.
It should be to build a more complete model of search visibility. Track the keywords. Track the commercial modifiers. Track the intent behind them. Examine the questions and prompts that grow from those searches. Compare that visibility with real search data and, ultimately, connect it to enquiries, sales and business performance. Keyword rankings have not become obsolete. They have become indicators within a much larger and increasingly conversational search journey.
If you would like to understand how your business can improve its visibility through SEO, while also adapting to AI-driven search through AEO, please get in touch.
