You can't do Aho-Corasick or any form of tree/trie structure (practically) without using pointers, and any form of pointer-chasing algorithm is going to have a tough time competing with the lower bounds of this algorithm, when we're dealing with 6 to 13 CPU cycles.

This data structure is specifically optimized for small sets of short strings. If we were dealing with larger data sets we wanted to match against, then a comparison against other contemporary techniques would be warranted.