Using Generative AI for SEO

Chapter 2. Essential Background on Generative AI

Chapter 1 laid the groundwork for discussing SEO in the age of AI. This chapter will give you the essentials you need to know about the generative AI market, including how to pick the right tools for your SEO projects. We’ll also discuss generative AI’s limitations and how it has affected search.

The topics we’ll cover include:

• Key technical terms for understanding generative AI

• An overview of the generative AI market

• Current limitations of generative AI and potential government regulations of it

• How generative AI will affect SEO and change search

Key Terms

Before we get started, here are some technical terms regarding generative AI that we will use frequently throughout this book:

Large language models (LLMs)

LLMs are at the core of generative AI tools. They are algorithms trained to understand language based on a crawl of the open internet and/or other large data sources. These are based on neural networks, and their size is measured by the number of parameters used in the neural network during the training of the algorithm. Increasing the size of a neural network has the potential to increase the power and accuracy of the LLM, but increases in network size can offer diminishing returns or even introduce new errors (due to the network “overfitting” the data) if the number of parameters grows too large.

Neural networks

Designed to process data in a manner inspired by the human brain, neural networks are one of ...