From 2021 to 2025 I was at PingPong, a cross-border payments company, where I owned one product line end to end; it grew from $2M to $76M in annual revenue in its first scaled year. The rebuild below happened in 2025, when I was Senior Digital Marketing Manager, Growth & Ops. For two years the keyword list I'd built behind our content did its job: the educational posts ranked and the rankings fed signups. Then, over the spring of 2025, the informational half of that list quietly stopped paying rent. Clicks fell month after month on the exact pages that used to be our most dependable earners.
I spent a week blaming tracking. The real cause was sitting at the top of the SERP: an AI Overview answering our keywords before anyone scrolled down to us. Almost nothing that headlined the old list survived both filters.
Naming the damage
The pattern wasn't unique to us. Pew Research Center tracked real browsing behavior across roughly 68,000 Google searches and found that when an AI Overview appeared, users clicked a traditional result on 8% of searches, against 15% when there was no Overview. Sources cited inside the summary got clicked 1% of the time. Half the clicks, gone, on any query Google decides to answer itself.
Ahrefs measured the same effect from the other direction: across a study of 300,000 keywords, when an AI Overview appeared, the top-ranking page lost 34.5% of its clicks. The detail that stung was the intent split. 99.2% of keywords that trigger Overviews are informational: “what is a virtual account,” “how does cross-border settlement work.” The exact educational queries our fintech blog was built on. And the floor keeps moving. Similarweb data shows zero-click searches rose from 56% to 69% of all Google searches between May 2024 and May 2025, so the volume column overstates clickable demand by a wider margin every quarter.
Once I accepted all that, the old spreadsheet was unusable. A keyword showing 2,000 searches a month with an Overview parked on it is no longer a 2,000-search keyword. Treated honestly, it might be worth 150 clicks split across everyone on page one.
The rebuilt spreadsheet
The new list is four columns wide, and two of those columns do all the work.
Raw volume stays, demoted to an input. Next to it: AI Overview present, yes or no, which I checked by hand for our top 150 keywords, the head of a master list running to roughly one to two thousand terms, in a clean browser profile, because the rank trackers were still catching up. Then adjusted expected clicks, which is crude arithmetic. Informational keywords with an Overview get their expected click-through cut roughly in half, per Pew's 8% versus 15%; transactional keywords keep their normal curve. Last, a compliance risk tier from 1 to 3, which I'll get to.
Crude is fine. The column exists to re-rank, and sorting by adjusted clicks instead of raw volume reordered the entire list. Head terms that had anchored two years of our content calendar dropped below operational queries I used to cut at the first pass.
A keyword with an AI Overview parked on it is a different keyword from the one your tool reports. Price it that way before you brief a writer.
The second filter kills different keywords
Filter one is math. Filter two is legal, and it removes keywords the math filter loves.
If your fintech touches brokerage or investment products, the second filter has a name. FINRA Rule 2210 treats any electronic communication reaching more than 25 retail investors in 30 days as a retail communication. A principal has to approve it. You have to keep the records. Blog posts built from your keyword list count. FINRA fined one broker-dealer $850,000 in 2024 over a social-media influencer program whose posts weren't fair and balanced. We were a payments company, so our review ran through partner-bank and money-transmitter rules, and the rule worked the same way. I tiered every planned page before a writer touched it, and compliance owned the verdicts. Tier 1 ships on the normal cycle, compliance reads Tier 2 drafts, and Tier 3 means the page probably cannot be written compliantly at all.
Here's the keyword the filter killed. “Guaranteed exchange rate” looked great in the new spreadsheet: real volume, transactional intent, no AI Overview in sight. Our compliance reviewer rejected it in one sentence: you can't put “guaranteed” next to a rate we don't control, and by the time the page carries the qualifiers that make it accurate, the headline is false. I tried “locked-in exchange rate” and dropped that too. The person searching “guaranteed” wants that word, and the SERP was owned by providers willing to say it. Tier 3, killed. Two hours with legal saved us from writing a page that could never rank for its own promise.
The cluster that beat both filters
What rose to the top of the re-sorted list was a cluster I'd been half-apologizing for since the first version: operational questions in the buyer's own words. “Is KYC required for overseas payouts.” “How long does settlement take to China.” “Can a US business receive EUR without an EU entity.” Individually most showed 10 to 50 searches a month; a few showed zero. Ahrefs looked at about 4 billion keywords and found that 94.74% get 10 or fewer monthly searches, so a list filtered at volume > 100 discards most of the demand.
The cluster dodged filter one because these questions are specific and the stakes are money in flight. A generic AI answer doesn't settle “will my supplier get paid before my production slot closes” for the person wiring the funds; they click through and verify. It sailed through filter two at tier 1, because the answers are documented facts about how the process works. Nothing to disclaim.
So I briefed the pages plainly and our writers built them: a content manager and two or three freelancers outside my reporting line, working to my briefs. One question, one direct answer around 1,500 words, structured after I pulled the top 10–30 ranking pages to see what Google believed the searcher wanted. The drafting workflow I built scores each page against the brief's question list, 0 to 100: the 40–50 range at outline, the 70s and 80s at full draft. The traffic reports on this cluster still look modest. The sales team says more by what it does: they send these pages mid-deal, and a buyer who lands on one arrives past curiosity, holding a specific fear about a specific wire.
Where I'd start on your list
Take your top 50 keywords, open each one in a clean browser profile, mark which carry an AI Overview, halve the expected clicks on the informational ones, and re-sort. That one hour will reorder your quarter.
Book 30 minutes with whoever reviews your marketing and tier the survivors into 1, 2 and 3 before anyone writes a brief. Keywords legal kills late are expensive.
Mine the long tail where it lives. I pulled ours from support transcripts and sales-call notes, phrases customers used that appeared nowhere on our site. I sort by the volume column last now. It counts searches, and I can only win clicks.