Episode 11: How Does RankBrain Affect Query Results Today?
Episode 11: How Does RankBrain Affect Query Results Today?
RankBrain was Google’s first publicly acknowledged application of machine learning to search ranking, introduced in 2015. By 2018, it had become one of the top three ranking factors Google had named - and one of the least understood, because its mechanism was probabilistic rather than rule-based. You couldn’t reverse-engineer a RankBrain signal the way you could reverse-engineer a backlink.
Episode 11 of the #SEOisAEO series went directly into that mechanism with Doc Sheldon, Omi Sido, and David Harry joining Jason Barnard to examine what RankBrain was actually doing to query results in 2018, and what practitioners needed to understand about it.
The core function is query substitution. When RankBrain encounters a query it hasn’t seen before - and Google reports that a significant proportion of daily queries are genuinely novel - it doesn’t fail. It maps the query to semantically similar queries it does understand, identifies the intent behind those queries, and returns results that satisfy that intent rather than matching the literal keywords. The implication for content strategy is direct: a page optimised for a single exact keyword phrase is optimised for a narrower slice of traffic than the same page structured to comprehensively address the topic and intent the keyword represents.
The episode also covered the relationship between RankBrain and Hummingbird, Google’s 2013 semantic search update. RankBrain is a continuation of the same project - getting better at understanding what a user means, not just what they typed - but where Hummingbird applied rule-based semantic interpretation, RankBrain applied learned interpretation. It got better with every query it processed.
For the AEO argument Jason was making throughout the series, RankBrain was important evidence. An answer engine that can interpret intent rather than match keywords is an answer engine that evaluates entities and credibility, not pages and keyword density. The shift RankBrain represented was a shift toward the kind of system AEO was built to serve.
The presentation deck used during Episode 11 of the #SEOisAEO series is preserved on SlideShare.
Published by: Semrush. Host: Jason Barnard. Guests: Doc Sheldon, Omi Sido, David Harry. November 13, 2018
