I just started the Google Ads Search certification and I'm wondering if there's a way to level-up keyword research.

It seems Google wants to dynamically find relevant keywords but this also seems to be in their best interest.

For example, since they continually use the bike scenario, why not use the sites that are ranking for 'best city bike' and plug them into a tool like Ahrefs and look to see what other keywords are driving their traffic, especially if it's obvious they've spent time/money on SEO?

If you want to get more granular, you could target keywords that are driving traffic to their product and landing pages.

Isn't this a better approach than just letting Google figure it out?