TNG/Earthling : AI Enabled SEO
For General Release
A press announcement today from TNG/Earthling's spokesperson Rev Sale was completely ignored by the mainstream press but picked up eagerly in The Garden2, a highly entropic group of over 2,500 sites that contribute resources enabling TNG/E's Bob Sakayama to run search experiments on their servers. In return all share in the discoveries. The members of Garden2 are the ones with the most to gain not only from their connection to TNG/E, but also from any actionable discoveries unveiled in those experiments.
Before we get to the announcement, some important background. CEO Bob Sakayama has been working on the concept of "Perfect SEO" for a while. It's an idealized goal that all SEOs strive to achieve. Oversimplified, it's a process that starts by discovering all the buttons that advance rank, and then pushing all those buttons. But the reality of making those discoveries requires much more luck and time than anyone has. Fortunately, we have discovered some of the rules to achieve high ranks that appear to be in play, so we have a starting point on which to build, but the idea that we could eventually discover all the constantly changing rules is our impossible dream. As to those rules, the truth is that we think we know more than we do. What we have are a few solid rules that are generally accepted knowledge and a lot of theories (speculation) based on observation. Some of those theories may end up supported by correlation with other known factors. But while we may think we have some understanding of the rules, we are still at the mercy of automated judgments that determine how well we rank, and in the online world rank is the most important measure of standing. Due to the sheer complexity of the problem, discovering all the guiding principles behind those automated judgments will not be done without AI help.
The information needed to initiate the training of an AI module is accessible online. Detailed posts on every possible SEO topic are plentiful, and in combination with TNG/E's own experiences form a vast universe of actionable situations that are teachable. TNG/Earthling's sources of information come from TNG/E's private rank experiments, which are always running as well as observing the behavior of clients' sites. Other teachable moments will come from monitoring website metrics in real time. Negative moves in ranks are opportunities for discovery - both the triggers and the process to mitigate. "We have sometimes had to make drastic adjustments to recover & preserve ranks. When you're pushing the system, sometimes it pushes back - we note what triggers any push back. During the teaching process, each time we discover a problem and successfully fix it, that fix gets remembered and becomes part of the system."
AI systems have to be trained to recognize the qualities that enable a website to perform well in the search, as well as the opposite. The system will need to be exposed to a huge amount of information from a broad spectrum of sources, but eventually should be able to do an SEO audit at least as good as a human team. But the real benefit of AI comes from the ability to analyze during the learning process and arrive at conclusions based on an ever improving knowledge base. Over time it should gain the ability to hypothesize and test its theories using scientific methodology to conduct experiments, and further learning from those outcomes.
"Imagine a system protocol, Generative Pre-trained AI, or GPAI, which, when applied to SEO, is constantly improving its ability to learn the attributes that impact rank, launch experiments, test rules, makes decisions, and draw conclusions upon which it is empowered to make revisions to a live site. It would run a daily site audit looking at ranks and traffic, and make corrections, improve content, find authority sites & link to them, optimize all aspects of the site, based on a best practices model derived from an analysis of past performance and ongoing experiments, taking into account the current performance of all sites in the portfolio, and with an emphasis on competitors. Daily testing can determine the optimum demographic to target, site size, design / layout, keyword choice, content theme, target audience, color scheme, page width, selection and positioning of images, font size, semantic emphasis, basically every possible attribute, while always testing to discover hidden attributes. This is AI applied to SEO.""TNG/Earthling is backing an effort to deploy more AI to SEO efforts. This will start with simple semantic experiments but we'll eventually have a fully automated process. We are choosing to launch this project now because the means to do it are in hand. Our first step is to apply OpenAI's api, called Generative Pre-trained Transformer version 3, or GPT-3, to assist our existing content generator, ConGurlAI in the eventual take over of all content creation and eventually all semantic oversight responsibilities, including tags and schema."
"What about copywriters? They will at first be needed to provide ideas and focus - feed basic research and present themes and premises to ConGurlAI to keep her on track so resources get used productively in training mode. But the Gurl is constantly learning the ropes and itself improving, so she is encouraged to step in and make code and content revisions if she's confident enough in a decision. Eventually ConGurlAI will always be confident, at which point human intervention will no longer be needed except for oversight."
"We fully realize that some will see this kind of automation to be a threat to their livelihoods, and they're probably right in the long run. But consider that good writers will be needed at first to train the AI what good writing is. ConGurl needs to pick the brains of the best writers so she can top their creations. Some may feel this is like training your replacement, and they would be right. But humans will still provide the essential creativity that may not be something that is AI trainable. A bigger problem may be in store for other skill sets. Like coders and basic programming skills - there are going to be pretty quickly turned over to AI."
"Artificial intelligence enhanced SEO is already here in ways that are hard to notice. AI is gaining momentum in many areas, and we think it will be a fun ride to be an early adopter in SEO. At first, which is where we are, it's going to be the cobbling together of many AI modules and aggregating their capabilities into a single mission. GPAI SEO is probably going to arrive piecemeal as the technology ramps up. TNG/Earthling is laying the first bricks in the foundation of that building."
Rev Sale # perfectSeo 4/17/2021