Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the design and study of systems that appear to behave intelligently: they reason, learn, perceive or act in ways that solve problems we associate with human thinking. It is an umbrella term. Machine learning, deep learning and large language models all sit inside it, alongside older rule-based approaches.

How it works

MLforSEO’s Introduction to Machine Learning for SEO course stresses the word “appear”. An AI product is usually several components working together: rules, machine learning models, perception (vision or speech) and often hardware. A voice assistant, a self-driving car or a Netflix recommendation row each combine many of these to look like a single intelligent system.

Early AI relied on symbolic logic and hand-written rules. Since the 2010s most progress has come from machine learning, where models learn patterns from data instead of following explicit instructions, and especially from deep neural networks. The transformer architecture, introduced in 2017, made today’s large language models and generative AI possible.

A practical way to place any tool: if it follows rules someone wrote, it is rule-based automation; if it learns from labelled examples, it is supervised machine learning; if it finds structure in unlabelled data, it is unsupervised learning; if it uses deep neural networks, it is deep learning.

How it’s used in SEO and marketing

• Search itself: ranking systems, query understanding, AI Overviews and AI Mode are all AI systems built from many models.
• Content and data work: entity extraction, sentiment analysis, clustering and classification of keywords, pages and reviews.
• Generative assistants for drafting, summarising and labelling at scale, with human review.
• Agents that browse, compare and act on a user’s behalf, which changes who (or what) reads your site.

Example

“Use AI for keyword research” can mean very different things. Grouping 10,000 keywords by meaning is a clustering task (machine learning). Asking a chatbot to suggest topic names for those groups is generative AI. Flagging any keyword containing “near me” as local intent is a rule. Naming which one you are doing makes it easier to choose the right tool and to judge the output.

Limitations and things to watch

• “AI” is used loosely in marketing; ask which model or method is actually doing the work.
• AI systems can be confidently wrong, especially generative ones, so outputs need checking against data or a human.
• Not every problem needs AI. MLforSEO’s rule of thumb is to check whether a spreadsheet formula or rule would do the job first.

Learn it on MLforSEO

• Introduction to Machine Learning for SEO course, starting with the lesson on the difference between AI and ML.
• The Characteristics of a Machine Learning Problem
• How to Find Machine-Learning-Enabled Automation in Your SEO Workflow
• When to use Machine Learning in SEO: Decision Checklist