The concept of artificial intelligence has been around for much longer than you may think. In fact, its core concept goes as far as the mid-1980s with the release of the first Terminator movie. We’ve long dreamt about being able to create sentience and the past few months have had people of the tech industry buzzing with the words “artificial intelligence” on their lips. It was only after Google released the Pixel 2 smartphone that the general public has come to recognize artificial intelligence, even though it was merely for the purpose of improving smartphone camera quality.
Google has been dabbling in this type of technology for many years. The first taste of “artificial intelligence” was with the release of the Google Assistant. Those who are keen observers would notice the quotation around artificial intelligence. This was because Google Assistant is not true AI in the sense that it cannot assimilate information autonomously.
For something to be deemed “intelligent”, it has to be capable of learning. According to the principles of psychology, learning is defined as “a long-term, or even permanent change in behavior as the result of a particular experience”.
As the organism is exposed to various stimuli, the organism is able to make mental notes of its experiences in the form of memories. These memories are then able to influence the organism’s behavior should the organism encounter the same scenario later on in its existence.
The concept of artificial intelligence in search engine optimization works in pretty much the same way. As a user performs search inquiries, the AI is able to tailor the results to match user preference and previous history.
Now, why did I call it a hypetrain? Well, simply because you can get left behind if you don’t get on it. And by getting on it, I mean studying the technology and learning how it functions. And by doing so, you are able to use that knowledge to your advantage — not to game the system, but rather to help bolster your site’s credibility.
And not everyone is going to be interested in learning how to utilize AI in SEO. Which is why it’s always best to leave these things to the experts. BestSEOCompanies.com is a great resource that contains a list of some of your best options when you need someone else to handle your SEO for you.
The cool fact here is that SEO and AI have been working synergistically for such a long time. RankBrain was released in 2015 and has since been used by Google to handle some of its search results. RankBrain is an algorithm that helps refine search results according to a plethora of factors.
So, this is where it gets tricky. RankBrain is NOT the Google algorithm. Rather, it is an algorithm of Google’s overall algorithm, Hummingbird. RankBrain is designed to perform some searches while the rest of the usual search is handled by Hummingbird and its many other sub-algorithms.
The best analogy for this would be a watch. Hummingbird is the entire movement system in the watch whereas RankBrain is a very important gear inside the watch. Each gear has a task assigned to it that ensures that the entirety of the system works efficiently.
