Yes, you can use ChatGPT for keyword research — at least, for parts of it. It can be helpful for brainstorming ideas, expanding topics, and organizing related terms.
If you try to use it for things like search volume, keyword difficulty, or deciding which terms are actually worth your time, though…well, that’s where the chatbot can fall short.
In this post, we’ll cover what parts of keyword research ChatGPT is and isn’t good at and whether it can replace a keyword research tool.
What Can ChatGPT Help With During Keyword Research?
For those of us who struggle with keyword research, ChatGPT can actually be pretty useful. You just have to use it for the parts that involve thinking through possibilities rather than pulling hard data.
Brainstorming seed keywords and topic ideas
ChatGPT tends to be best at the beginning stages of keyword research. For example, if you have a broad topic but aren’t sure where to go with it, you can ask for related keyword ideas and use those as a starting point.
Say you run a project management software company. You could ask ChatGPT for keyword ideas related to project management, and it might generate a whole list of topics around:
- Team collaboration
- Task management
- Project planning,
- Software comparisons
- Templates
- Productivity
And on and on and on.
Sure, some of these ideas may go absolutely nowhere, but that’s what the brainstorming stage is for. You’re really just trying to find directions worth looking into, and as a large language model, ChatGPT isn’t short on content ideas.
Expanding keyword variations and questions
Once you’ve found a few directions worth exploring, ChatGPT can help you dig into them a little further. You can use it to turn a broad keyword into more specific variations, identify other questions people may have, or look at the topic from different angles.
So, if you’re looking into project management keywords, you could try prompts like:
- “Give me long-tail keyword variations for small teams looking for better ways to manage projects.”
- “What questions do people ask when they’re comparing tools for managing tasks and deadlines?”
- “What related searches might come up around team collaboration, project planning, or productivity?”
And the more context you give ChatGPT, the more useful those suggestions tend to be. Don’t assume it knows exactly what you’re talking about. Generic prompts get your generic results, so the more detailed you can be, the better.
Grouping related keywords into themes
ChatGPT isn’t just good for generating ideas — it’s good for organizing them too.
Once you have your list of ideas, simply paste them in and ask it to group keywords that seem to cover the same topic, problem, or search need together. A prompt like “Group these keywords into themes based on what the searcher is actually looking for, and flag any terms that could fit into more than one group,” gives it a much clearer job than simply asking it to organize the list.
Those groups can give you a rough first pass at what might belong in the same keyword cluster. You still need to check the SERPs, though, because ChatGPT is grouping terms based on how similar they sound, not on how Google actually treats them.
If you find that two keywords bring up many of the same pages, there’s a stronger case for targeting them together. But if the results are completely different, they may need separate pages, even if the wording looks similar.
So ChatGPT can speed up the early sorting, while the SERPs help you confirm the actual keyword clustering decisions.
Helping interpret search intent
Search intent is really about one question: what does someone expect to find when they type a keyword into Google?
And ChatGPT can help you work through that before you start planning the content. Just give it a keyword and ask it to explain what the searcher is likely trying to accomplish, what questions they may want answered, and what kind of page would best satisfy that search.
For example, you could ask, “For the keyword ‘best project management software for small teams,’ what is the likely search intent, what would the searcher expect to see on the page, and what would make a result feel incomplete?”
That gives you something more useful than a simple label like “commercial intent.” You can start thinking about whether the page needs comparisons, pricing information, feature breakdowns, use cases, reviews, or something else entirely.
But again, you should still search the keyword yourself afterward. ChatGPT can make a reasonable interpretation based on the wording, but the SERPs show you what Google is actually rewarding for that query.
If nearly every top result is a comparison page, for example, publishing a basic “what is project management software?” article probably isn’t going to match the search intent very well.
What Can’t ChatGPT Reliably Tell You About Keywords?
When it comes to keyword research, ChatGPT’s biggest limitation is its lack of live keyword data.
You can certainly ask ChatGPT for things like monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, CPC, or whether one keyword is more competitive than another. Unless it’s connected to a specialized SEO platform, an advertising account, or a current keyword dataset, though, you shouldn’t treat ChatGPT as a reliable source for search volume, keyword difficulty, CPC, or other keyword metrics.
With ChatGPT’s tendency to hallucinate, any answers it gives here may be completely made up.
A keyword can sound like a great fit and still have barely any keyword volume, be much harder to rank for than expected, or bring in traffic that isn’t especially useful for your business. So, for those decisions, you still need a keyword research tool or another reliable source of current data.
ChatGPT can help you interpret the numbers once you have them, but it shouldn’t be where you get them in the first place.
Should You Use ChatGPT Instead of a Keyword Research Tool?
Whether you should use ChatGPT instead of a keyword research tool really depends on what you need it for.
If you’re brainstorming ideas, expanding topics, organizing keywords, or working through search intent, ChatGPT can handle a lot of that pretty well. But if you need reliable data on search volume, competition, CPC, or what’s currently ranking, you may be better off using Semrush for keyword research or another tool.
In practice, the two work better together than either one does on its own.
Build a Better Keyword Strategy With MarketingPal
ChatGPT can help you come up with keyword ideas and organize them, but that still leaves the bigger question of what you should actually create.
A good keyword strategy needs more than a list of terms. You need to know which topics are worth pursuing, how they fit together, what order to tackle them in, and how each piece supports the rest of your site.
And MarketingPal’s Topical Authority Content Plans can help. We combine keyword research with a broader content strategy, so you’re not just chasing individual keywords one at a time.
And if you want help turning that plan into actual pages, we can handle the content creation too. Contact us to learn more today.
