Artificial Intelligence and SEO combined to offer a better experience

AI and SEO: new challenges and opportunities for online research

SEO – Search Engine Optimization – is a fundamental activity for a digital project, as it allows a site or content to be seen and/or found when users carry out relevant searches.
Based on the product or service you want to promote, a correct SEO strategy is able to give it more visibility in the eyes of users who demonstrate a need, a necessity, whether it is informational or transactional.

Thanks to SEO tools, you have the possibility of being found both by those who are doing targeted searches and by those who still don’t have a precise idea of what to look for.

In this context, perhaps not everyone knows that, for some years now, AI, artificial intelligence, has been gaining ground.

Google and Artificial Intelligence: a story destined to last

Take Google as an example.
At the beginning, the algorithms that provide search results were based on not too complex rules: they processed the correspondence between the keywords entered in the search bar and the content of the websites that Google, on a periodic basis, scanned and inserted into its database.

Over the last few years, this system has undergone a considerable evolution, and the number of factors considered in order to ensure that the content offered to the user is not only responsive to the request, but also useful and of quality, is always growing.

Among these factors, new parameters are making their way, such as links, authors, the “authority” of the site and specific pages, so much so that SEO consultancy has begun to be increasingly requested to be able to manage a network gradually more complex of elements that determine the organic positioning.

In 2015 there was a further, important update: the introduction of AI.
Google releases RankBrain, a deep learning system that begins to untie the results of searches from just words to connect them, instead, to the concept they want to express. It means that Google, regardless of the exact terms you type into the search bar, will try to interpret the idea of what you are looking for.

Thanks to this innovation, even in the world of SEO – both by SEO specialists and SEO agencies – the focus passes from the keyword alone to the search intent, to what the user needs beyond the terms used.

The logic underlying the functioning of artificial intelligence has then been further updated and enhanced over the years. It has been made more precise, in order to refine the search results to be shown to the user. To understand the extent of these updates to the search engine, consider that the MUM update, released by Google in 2021, was programmed to process search results based on 75 different languages, to provide multimodal responses including text and images, with the aim of extending also to audio and video.

The direction taken by AI is clear: to understand what the user wants, regardless of the keywords he types, and to provide him with the best possible result.

Suffice it to recall, in fact, that Google’s priority is to provide the user with the best results, based on the so-called EEAT paradigm:

– Experience: the experience of the creator of the content;
– Expertise: the competence;
– Authoritativeness: the authoritativeness of the author, of the content itself and of the entire site;
– Trustworthiness: the reliability of the page, in terms of honesty, security and reliability.

Artificial Intelligence on the side of professionals

If, on the one hand, artificial intelligence is used by Google to improve search results, on the other, professionals in the digital and communication sector do not sit idly by.
In fact, more and more advanced solutions based on AI are being developed – in particular on generative AI, such as the well-known ChatGPT, OpenAI’s open source project successfully announced in the sector and non-sector media.

Through this tool it is possible to generate codes and texts of different types, ranging from answers to specific questions, to the translation and production of texts on the most varied topics. In short, the potential of the tool is really large.

However, one of the most debated topics today is how reliable these tools are in the outputs they provide, and how much we can trust the information thus obtained.
Curious? We asked ChatGPT directly.

How reliable is the information produced by ChatGPT or other generative AI tools?

The information produced by ChatGPT or other generative artificial intelligence tools may not always be totally reliable. Generative AI tools produce answers based on statistical models built on massive amounts of data, but they may not fully understand the context or may generate incorrect or misleading information.

Because generative AI tools don’t actively examine or verify information sources, they can also produce results that are unsubstantiated or based on unreliable sources. Therefore, it is always advisable to view the information produced by these tools with a degree of caution and always verify the information through reputable sources and by consulting human experts or other authoritative sources when necessary.

From the answer it can easily be deduced that – although they are rather interesting tools – there still remains a basic need to “guide” them.
Consider, as an example, the need to write content for a blog or for the pages of a company website.

Without a strategy that accurately identifies industry research, the competitive landscape, or accurate instructions coupled with human review, you risk ending up with content that presents information that is misleading, incorrect, outdated, or does not fully meet your expectations. needs of the target audience.

And in terms of SEO?

As an introduction to the article, it was explained how important it is for Google to position useful, reliable and quality results, and how algorithm updates are proceeding in this direction.

The same search engine answers some of the most frequently asked questions about SEO and generative AI, emphasizing:

“Regardless of how you produce content, for optimal Google Search results, you should strive to produce content that is original, high-quality, and designed for people who meet the EEAT criteria.”

And then:

“For topics where information quality is critical, such as health, social or financial information, our systems place even greater importance on reliability indicators.”

From an SEO point of view, therefore, the use of generative AI does not represent a problem, as long as this automatic intelligence constitutes only a part of the production of the content.
The study of keywords, creativity and originality in the production of content, as well as control of information and sources, require the intervention of typical figures of SEO agencies, such as copywriters, SEO specialists or a professional figure who guarantees that that product is not only an elaboration of information already present on the web, but it is something more, which deserves to be positioned higher, and therefore to have greater visibility, compared to the others present on the web.

SEO and Artificial Intelligence: what fate awaits them?

Considering the current panorama and the basis for the future direction that the main search engine seems to have set, what emerges is that it will be increasingly important to know how to manage the new AI tools, to fully understand their limits and potential, but above all to be able to monitor and analyze the results that these tools will return in terms of changing users’ online behavior.

This article has focused on the use of artificial intelligence by Google and some web professionals, but the range of possible fields of use is very wide. Think of the implementation of a chatbot on a site that responds to the user’s main requests, able to improve his browsing experience on the one hand, and to make the customer assistance activity more flexible, on the other. Or the management of large quantities of data related to SEO searches, which can be sorted and categorized by AI, allowing operators to optimize time and output.

The use of AI has not only changed – and is changing – the way search engines provide users with answers to their searches, but also the way users themselves approach search results and the ways to search for resources and content.

What has been introduced over the years is only a small part of the change that will take place, which has already begun. In this phase, an increasingly important role is played by the figures of SEO specialists, copywriters and agencies, who have the task of following and guiding companies competently towards the future.