Keyword Research for SEO and AI Search: A Step-by-Step Guide

Keyword research is where SEO strategy gets grounded in reality. Without it, content decisions are educated guesses at best and misdirected effort at worst. With it, every page your site publishes or optimizes has a clearly defined target: a specific query that real people are entering into search engines, and that you have a realistic path to ranking for.

What's changed recently is that ranking is no longer the only outcome worth optimizing for. AI Overviews the AI-generated summaries appearing at the top of Google's search results are now influencing how and whether users click through to any organic result at all. Keyword research that accounts for both traditional rankings and AIO visibility produces a more complete strategy than one focused on search volume alone. For agencies managing SEO across multiple clients, building this dual approach into keyword research from the start is increasingly the standard, not an advanced consideration.

The process isn't technically complex, but it rewards rigor and patience. Rushing through it produces a keyword list that looks comprehensive but doesn't translate into an executable strategy. Taking it seriously produces a roadmap that drives SEO decision-making for months.

Start with Seed Keywords

Seed keywords are the broad, foundational terms that describe your business, service, or content area. They're not necessarily what you'll target directly.  Most are too competitive or too vague to drive useful traffic on their own,  but they're the starting point for discovering the more specific, more actionable terms that actually belong in your strategy.

The best source for seed keywords is often the language your customers use rather than the language your business uses internally. Industry jargon doesn't always match how people search. A law firm's "estate planning services" might be what clients actually search for as "will and trust attorney" or "how to set up a trust." Starting from the customer's perspective, not the business's vocabulary, produces better seed terms and better downstream results.

At this stage, it's also worth flagging which seed terms are likely to trigger AI Overviews. Broad informational queries- anything framed around "what is," "how does," or "why"- are the most common AIO triggers. Identifying these early lets you separate keywords where your goal is traditional ranking from keywords where the real opportunity is getting cited inside the AI-generated response.

Expand Using Research Tools

Once you have your seed terms, keyword research tools do the heavy lifting of expansion. These platforms surface related terms, show search volume, estimate competition, and reveal the questions and variations real searchers use around a topic. The volume data is particularly valuable,  not because you should always target high-volume terms, but because it reveals the relative scale of different keyword opportunities and helps you prioritize where to invest content resources first.

Look beyond the primary keyword report. Most tools offer related questions, "people also search for" data, and competitive keyword gap analysis, all of which surface opportunities that a straightforward keyword search might miss. Pay particular attention to question-format keywords. These are the queries most likely to generate AI Overview responses, and they're also the queries where a well-structured, answer-first page has the strongest chance of being cited as a source.

Competitor analysis is especially useful at this stage: identifying the keywords a competitor ranks for that you don't reveal established demand you could be capturing. For agencies, running this analysis across a client's top three to five competitors typically surfaces more actionable targets than building a keyword list from scratch.

Evaluate Intent Before Volume

The most important filter to apply when evaluating keywords isn't volume; it's intent. Every search query reflects a goal: learning something, finding a specific site, comparing options, or taking action. A keyword with modest monthly volume and clear transactional intent will typically drive more valuable traffic than a high-volume informational keyword, because the searchers arriving through it are closer to a decision.

Intent evaluation also determines what kind of content belongs on a given page, and whether that page is being optimized for traditional SEO, for AIO visibility, or both. Informational queries with high AIO trigger rates need pages structured for citation: direct answer-first openings, concise self-contained paragraphs, and FAQ sections that mirror the specific questions searchers are asking. Transactional queries need pages built for conversion. Conflating these two structures, building a service page to target an informational keyword, or writing an educational post to target a transactional one is a mismatch that limits performance regardless of how well the content is written.

The practical way to evaluate intent is to search the keyword yourself and examine what currently ranks. If the first page is dominated by blog posts and guides, the search engine has determined that users want informational content. If service pages and product listings dominate, the intent is commercial or transactional. If an AI Overview appears at the top, note its structure the sources it cites and the way it frames the answer are signals about what Google considers authoritative for that query.

Assess Competitive Difficulty Honestly

Keyword difficulty scores from SEO tools provide a useful directional signal, but they require honest interpretation. A keyword rated as moderately difficult for a high-authority site might be genuinely out of reach for a newer domain. The more informative approach is to examine the actual pages ranking in positions one through ten: look at their domain authority, the quality and depth of their content, their backlink profiles, and how long they've been established.

For AIO-targeted keywords, competitive difficulty works differently. A page doesn't need to rank first to be cited in an AI Overview; it needs to be structured in a way that makes it easy for Google's AI to extract and synthesize a clear answer. This means newer or lower-authority sites have a more level path to AIO visibility than they do to traditional ranking, provided the content is well-structured and directly answers the query. Identifying keywords where AIO citation is a realistic near-term goal, even before traditional ranking becomes achievable, is a useful way to accelerate early visibility for clients in competitive markets.

If the top traditional results include large national brands with extensive SEO resources, a newer or smaller site needs to find a different angle: a more specific geographic modifier, a longer-tail variation, or a question-format variation that serves a narrower but less contested segment of the same audience. Honest competitive assessment at this stage prevents the frustration of targeting terms that weren't achievable with the resources available.

Map Keywords to Pages and Build Topic Clusters

Keyword research only becomes a strategy when keywords are mapped to specific pages. Each key page on your site should have a designated primary keyword and a cluster of related secondary terms that support it. This prevents keyword cannibalization multiple pages competing for the same term — and gives search engines a clear signal about what each page is trying to rank for.

The topic cluster model takes this further. A central pillar page covers a broad topic comprehensively and links to a constellation of supporting pages that each address a specific subtopic in depth. Supporting pages link back to the pillar, and the resulting structure signals to search engines that the site has genuine authority across the full topic. For agencies building content programs for clients, this architecture consistently outperforms a collection of disconnected individual posts, and it creates a natural internal linking framework that distributes authority across the cluster.

For content programs that include both SEO and AIO targets, the cluster model also allows you to differentiate page structure by intent. Pillar pages can be built for comprehensive coverage and traditional ranking, while supporting pages targeting question-format keywords can be structured specifically for AIO citation: concise, direct, and built around the specific queries the cluster is designed to answer.

Agencies managing this across multiple client accounts often find that white-label SEO support makes the cluster-building process more scalable, particularly when keyword mapping, content production, and internal linking all need to happen in parallel across different domains and industries.

Separate Your SEO and AIO Keyword Lists

As AI Overviews become a standard feature of Google's results, treating SEO and AIO optimization as a single undifferentiated process leaves visibility on the table. The keywords most likely to trigger AI Overviews broad informational queries, how-to questions, definition and comparison queries often aren't the same keywords that drive the highest-value traditional traffic. Building separate keyword lists, or at a minimum, separate columns in your keyword map that flag AIO trigger likelihood, allows you to assign the right content structure to the right keywords from the start.

Pages targeting AIO citation need to be built differently from pages targeting traditional ranking. Answer-first structure, question-based headers, concise self-contained paragraphs, and structured FAQ sections are the formatting signals that make a page easy for Google's AI to synthesize from. Agencies that have developed a repeatable AIO content framework apply these standards systematically rather than making structural decisions page by page.

Build in Regular Revisits

Keyword research isn't a document you create once and archive. Search behavior evolves, new competitors emerge, industry terminology shifts, and keyword opportunities that weren't viable six months ago become achievable as a site's authority grows. The introduction of AI Overviews has added another variable: queries that didn't generate AIO responses six months ago may now, and the reverse is also true. A keyword strategy that doesn't account for how the SERP itself is changing will gradually fall out of alignment with where visibility is actually being generated.

Building a quarterly review of your keyword strategy into your SEO calendar adding new targets as they become relevant, retiring underperforming ones, updating priorities as rankings shift, and auditing which target keywords are now generating AIO responses — keeps the strategy current and ensures execution effort is always directed at the right opportunities.

A Note for Agencies

For agencies managing keyword research across a client portfolio, the complexity compounds quickly. Each client operates in a different competitive environment, at a different stage of domain authority, and with a different mix of SEO and AIO keyword opportunities. Building and maintaining keyword strategies at that scale while keeping content production, on-page optimization, and reporting running in parallel is where white-label SEO support makes the most practical difference.



Agency Elevation builds and manages keyword strategies as part of a full-service white-label SEO offering, including AIO-optimized content frameworks for clients where AI Overview visibility is a priority. If you're managing SEO across multiple accounts and need a partner equipped to handle both, contact us to learn how we work.