Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence is software that performs tasks normally requiring human judgement, such as recognising language, images or patterns.
In detail
In marketing, "AI" almost always means machine-learning systems trained on large datasets: language models that generate and summarise text, and ranking or bidding systems that predict outcomes.
It is not a single product. Google Ads bidding, an AI answer in search results and a chat assistant are three different applications of the same broad family of techniques.
Example
A smart bidding strategy predicting which clicks are likely to convert is AI; so is a search engine writing a summary of ten pages.
Why it matters
Knowing which kind of AI is involved tells you what you can actually influence — the training data, the prompt, or the source content being summarised.
Common mistakes
- Treating "AI" as one product with one optimisation strategy.
- Assuming AI output is factual without checking the source.
Related questions
Related articles
- What Is AI SEO? How AI Is Changing Search in 2026
AI answers changed how search results are consumed, not how pages are assessed. Here is what actually changed, and what to do about it.
Related guides
- The Complete AI SEO GuideGuide
How to stay visible when answers are generated: retrievability, answer-shaped content, entities, structured data, and honest measurement.
Related terms
- Generative AI
Generative AI is a model that produces new content — text, images, code or audio — rather than only classifying existing data.
- Large Language Model (LLM)
A large language model is a generative model trained on very large amounts of text to predict and produce language.
- AI Search
AI search is any search experience where a generative model answers the query directly instead of only listing links.
- AI SEO
AI SEO means adapting search work to a results page where AI answers appear, and using AI responsibly in the work itself.
Related questions
- How does AI affect SEO?
AI answers change how results are consumed rather than how pages are assessed. An AI summary can answer a question directly, so fewer people click through for simple informational queries.