This fall, a small skincare seller posted in r/Google_Ads about something odd.
Their ads for beef tallow balm used to show up on searches like "tallow cream." Then Google started matching them to pharmacy brands and generic face creams, and they kept adding negative keywords to make it stop.
One reply put it bluntly: exact match "isn't truly exact anymore."
That's semantic search, seen from the side where it costs you money. Google decided different words meant roughly the same thing, and acted on it.
Short answer: semantic search matches meaning, not just words. In our test, rare phrasings mostly got pages written in the common phrasing, yet same-meaning searches still showed almost entirely different pages.
All 14 pairs, the embedding scores and the method are in RankControl's semantic search guide. Here's the short version, and what I'd do with it.