To the best of our knowledge, there is no definitive set of strategic molecules comprising current important industrially-produced molecules and the promising future molecules, or alternatives to the existing one. The topic of product substitution is regularly discussed in the chemical and environmental literature within the contexts of green chemistry and sustainability, and a number of bulk intermediates were proposed for the emerging bio-based chemical supply chain. This, however, is a much narrower set than the proposed set of strategic molecules that would cover bulk as well as functionalised intermediates. In the absence of such a list we cannot evaluate our approach by comparing the outputs. One inherent challenge for the identification of strategic molecules is that there is no general 'true' answer. Thus, there is no quantitative method to evaluate our results. Accordingly, we evaluate our results qualitatively. For this we show that common industrial chemicals, important precursors, and potential new building block molecules are at least the subsets of our findings. We consult Ullmanns encyclopaedia of industrial organic chemistry 63 for the evaluation of common industrial intermediates. Additionally, we highlight similarities of our results and the highest ranked privileged scaffolds for biomedical applications. To indicate the algorithms' ability to identify not only petrochemical based strategic locations we consider potential future bio-based building blocks. We further demonstrate the use of strategic molecules in reaction pathway searches by using DF searches on the graph structure to indicate possible multi-step reactions.