Google's AI capability has limited impact on SEO

Clearly Google's use of AI has helped them to serve more accurate answers to users, however what does this mean for your SEO strategy?

Google Search and AI

In a recent article author Pandu Nayak provided a great overview of how Google uses AI and machine learning to power great search results. The multitude of different systems used by Google highlights how difficult a task it is for machine's to understand content and therefore rank the most appropriate document in search so that the user query is answered. They use RankBrain (yep it is still a thing), Neural matching (underpinned by Neural Networks) and BERT to rank and retrieve the most relevant documents in Google Search. Although the much vaunted MUM gets an honourable mention it is not yet in play within the traditional elements of search, however the multi-modal understanding (ability to understand images, video and multiple languages) it will introduce will have a significant impact on the types of content Google will be able to serve in the search results.

Google has utilised the above technologies to make incredible improvements in how they understand content, but what I actually found most interesting was the scale of the task at hand. The most obvious demonstration was that I interpreted one of the examples very differently to the author. Reading the article on my phone I didn't actually notice the content of the below image when reading the example query "insights how to manage a green". My initial thought was, "isn't that what Greenkeepers do?", my mind had made the leap to a golf green based on my specific context. However, the author Pandu Nayak was actually referring to colour based personality profiles and the method by which a manager would manage a direct report who fitted this profile. In a nutshell this encapsulates the challenge Google's machines face when interpreting search queries and returning the most appropriate document. When humans make to completely different interpretations of a query, good luck to the machines!

How does this affect SEO?

You know what I don't think all of this clever tech actually affects SEO. There I said it. What Google's AI and machine learning capabilities actually mean is that you can continue optimising your content for your customers, rather than worrying about how it will be interpreted by machines.

Google's improved understanding of both the context of documents, as well as multiple formats means that you can focus on creating great content which incorporates rich media and be safe in the knowledge that sometime soon Google will be able to understand, and then serve all of your awesome content directly to your customers.