Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the art and science of gaming search engine algorithms in order to increase the amount of traffic to a website through organic search engine results. It involves understanding how search engine algorithms retrieve and prioritize data in order to optimize the query results they offer a user. Search engines use a combination of algorithms and different ranking factors to deliver webpages ranked by relevance.
SEO has evolved from traditional approaches like keyword research and content optimization to methods that leverage the state of the art in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Surfer was founded in 2017 by Lucjan Suski, his brother Michal Suski, and Slawek Czajkowski. They were later they were joined by Tomasz Niezgoda and Kazik Piętka. The founders identified gaps in how well SEO methods were performing. Taking advantage of the opportunity, the Surfer team was able to develop algorithms that respond to SEO algorithms in real time, while at the same time offering an intuitive and information rich user interface and experience for their clients.
The Current State of SEO Leverages AI and Large Language Models
Traditional SEO methods have focused on strategies like keyword research and content optimization. High rankings are achieved by understanding and leveraging how search engines index and serve up content to users. Content creators and websites need to align what they do and how they are structured with how search engine algorithms prioritize data. Typically, this has been done by incorporating relevant keywords and ensuring that a website’s structure and organization is optimized for search engine crawlers — bots that scour the web collecting data.
Traditional SEO practices have evolved to integrate machine learning and AI in order to automate the analysis — and ultimately, the optimization — of search trends and the generation of content. AI-focused SEO methods can parse through huge amounts of online data, identifying subtle and hidden patterns in user behaviors. As a result, these tools can determine the most impactful keywords, predicting how search engine algorithms will prioritize search results. They can also suggest website content structured in ways that are likely to resonate with both search engines algorithms and human consumers.
LLM’s are particularly good at content creation because they can generate human-like text that mirrors the anticipated intent of human search patterns, in turn improving a website’s relevancy and perceived authority on a subject.
However, while undoubtedly powerful, existing AI SEO models and approaches still require significant human oversight in order to ensure the accuracy and relevance of generated content and SEO strategies.
Surfer’s Approach to SEO AI Integration
In contrast, Surfer’s approach to using AI in SEO differs from conventional approaches. The company still makes full use of the efficiency of AI and LLM’s for content creation and optimization, but they are attempting to go further by focusing on real-time, data-driven SEO recommendations.
Instead of solely relying on AI for content generation, Surfer uses AI as a part of a broader holistic strategy that at the same time prioritizes on-page considerations such as site structure, keyword usage, and content quality. The AI algorithms and tools that Surfer has built are specifically fine-tuned to reverse-engineer the ranking factors of Google’s algorithms. This means that the content they help create and optimize is cognitively appealing to human consumers while being simultaneously specifically designed for ranking success.
In other words, Surfer’s AI tool is not just a content creator but an SEO strategist, in contrast to approaches that have traditionally used AI primarily for generating text and other content, without an iterative and constantly improving design focus on SEO performance.
