What is RankBrain?

RankBrain is a component of Google’s algorithm which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to determine the most relevant search results for search queries. It is incredibly important to understand if you are a SEO Company or business in London and or in the World.

Before RankBrain, Google utilised a basic algorithm to determine search results. Now, RankBrain can use various factors such as the location of the searcher, personalisation and certain search words to better understand the searchers intent. For more information, check out How RankBrain is analysing page relevance

What’s the point of RankBrain?

Google state that RankBrain is responsible/influencing 15% of all searches. To put this into perspective it would be the equivalent of half of all Wikipedia pages now being under the thumb of AI.

This machine learning technology now scours the web and learns as humans do to understand important links between words. An example of this is the relationship between countries and their capitals. The graph below shows the plotting of points and their vectors (relationships) to one another.

Google sent out its AI to read various news articles and it then plotted the most relevant concepts attributed one another. So in this case Google’s AI learnt the concept of capital cities by simply reading news articles and attributing the relationship between countries and their respective capitals. If you managed to grasp this then you will understand that this essentially means that the face of search is about to change significantly.

Google will and probably already does understand a large amount of human behaviour through search. It understands trends and probabilities, attitudes and moods and soon enough you.

What does RankBrain mean for SEO?

Well at present it can only mean that if you are performing white hat SEO then you are in the clear. AI’s understanding of a good and bad site is better than that of Google’s chief algorithmic engineers by a clear 10%. The AI was able to identify a more respected and relevant site quicker and better than humans. The tide of man vs machine is turning. So how can you use RankBrain to better optimise your site? The two most important ranking algorithm factors are linking and content.

Quality Content

According to Google’s Gary Illyes, you should be writing content that sounds human. He said if you try to sound like a robot, RankBrain will get confused and push back your ranking. Ironic, right?

Most importantly, your content should be of good quality. Content should be easy to read and conversational. Content should also be regularly updated, and relevant for search intent.

RankBrain is constantly being updated, unlike some other learning algorithms Google employs. So the best option is to keep doing the right thing and Google will reward your site. This gives your website the best chance of keeping up with the ever changing algorithm.