CHAPTER TWO
Generative AI and Search
Search engines, recommendation engines, and related systems have been actively using artificial intelligence algorithms for decades, but the landscape changed dramatically with OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT in November 2022. ChatGPT opened up the possibility of an entirely different way for humans to interact with machines to get answers to questions. This type of AI technology is referred to as generative AI. This chapter will explore both how search engines are applying this technology and what opportunities exist for organizations to use generative AI as part of their SEO programs.
The first few sections provide some basic background on the current AI landscape to provide some context for the technology and help clarify its broader implications. If you’d like to jump ahead to applications, you can skip to “Generative AI Solutions”.
A Brief Overview of Artificial Intelligence
The concept of AI algorithms was originally formulated in the 1950s, with Alan Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, considered to be a cornerstone paper in the AI field. The term artificial intelligence was coined by computer scientists John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude E. Shannon, with early AI research and development activity taking place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Oxford. Most of what we see today in terms of AI consists of neural networks and large language models (LLMs) based on very ...
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