What is RankBrain?

Answered across 5 episodes of The Best SEO Podcast

The short answer

Google's first artificial intelligence method for understanding queries, introduced almost five years before BERT, focused on matching queries to actual content on the page.

How experts on the show define it

Google's first artificial intelligence method for understanding queries, introduced almost five years before BERT, focused on matching queries to actual content on the page.

From Google's Latest search algorithm to better understand natural language by Barry Schwartz #470

Google's machine learning artificial intelligence system that helps interpret long-tail and never-before-seen search queries.

From 10 SEO Tips To Get Your Website To The Top Of Google Search by Christopher Ratcliff #499

Google's AI system introduced in October 2015 that ranks pages based on how well they satisfy users, using signals like organic click-through rate and dwell time.

From 21 Actionable SEO Techniques That Work GREAT in 2019 #464

A Google system that evaluates context and relevance of content, making irrelevant pages potentially damaging to a site's overall SEO standing.

From 4 Most Important Ranking Factors According to SEO Industry Studies by Aleh Barysevich #383

An artificial intelligence created by Google that embeds written language into entities called vectors, allowing it to interpret vague or indirect search queries and return results for related terms.

From 12 Reasons Why You Might Never Want to Hire an In-House SEO by Neil Patel #297

Episodes that cover this

Related answers

See the full SEO & AI search glossary.

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