Earlier this week, Frédéric Dubut, the PM of overall Bing’s core search team, said that 2020 will be the year where keyword research becomes obsolete, you can read exactly what he said there. Well, I asked John Mueller from Google if he feels the same and he said basically no.

He said even as search engines become better and better at understanding searcher intent, there “always gonna be a little bit of room for keyword research.” But he did seem to agree that keyword research, for search, might become less and less important.

He said this at the 51:52 mark into the video:

Barry asked: Frederick from Bing basically made a short video saying keyword research practices are kind of going away and should be replaced by intent research practices. So it’s not thinking about keywords, thinking about intent. Do you have any thoughts about that?

John responded: I didn’t see that but I I think, in general, that there’s probably always gonna be a little bit of room for keyword research because you’re kind of you’re providing those words to users. And even if search engines are trying to understand more than just those words. Showing specific words to users can make it a little bit easier for them to understand what your pages are about and can sometimes drive a little bit of that conversion process. So I don’t see these things going away completely but I’m sure search engines will get better over time to understand more than just the words on a page.

Here is what Frederick said:

Forum discussion at YouTube Community.