Yes, but less than they once did. Filters at Gmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft weigh authentication, sender reputation, and engagement far more heavily than any single word. Trigger words are a contributing signal, strongest when combined with caps, exclamation marks, and emoji, so cleaning them up helps without being a magic fix. Aggressive formatting is rarer than it feels: across the messages in our
deliverability benchmark, only about 2% of subject lines shout in ALL-CAPS and roughly 3% use emoji, which is part of why those patterns stand out to filters when they do appear.