Oh, absolutely. It's like Google finally got tired of people stuffing "best running shoes" into a page and decided to read our minds instead. The shift from lexical to semantic search has made keyword research feel less like a treasure hunt and more like trying to predict the weather inside someone's brain.
What gets me is how many people are still clinging to exact match like it's a safety blanket. If you're not building campaigns around intent groups now, you're basically throwing money at AI Overviews and hoping for the best. Google Keyword Planner still works for a top-level view, but you've got to go deeper. I've been digging through forums and review sites to catch the weird, conversational phrases people actually use when they're close to buying. that's where the gold is.
Trick I've started using: group a bunch of pain-point long-tail terms together, whack them on broad match, and let the algorithm figure out the thousand ways someone might type "I'm sick of [competitor] and need something that doesn't suck." Works surprisingly well, but you have to keep an eye on friction signals. if people keep bouncing, the algo learns nothing useful.
Comparison keywords are also a gift that keeps on giving. "[Competitor] alternative for [niche]" is basically a buy signal wrapped in a search query. just don't tell everyone, or the bids will go through the roof.
