Natural Language Processing.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the branch of AI concerned with giving computers the ability to understand text and spoken words in the same way humans can. NLP combines computational linguistics, machine learning, and deep learning to interpret meaning, sentiment, intent, and context.

NLP Techniques Relevant to SEO

Key NLP techniques include tokenisation (splitting text into units), named entity recognition (identifying people, places, brands), sentiment analysis (positive/negative/neutral tone), and semantic similarity (measuring how closely two pieces of text mean the same thing). Google's BERT and MUM models are NLP milestones.

How NLP Changed SEO

Pre-NLP search relied on exact keyword matches. NLP allows search engines to understand conversational queries, answer questions directly in SERPs, and evaluate content quality by meaning rather than keyword frequency. Content written for humans now consistently outperforms content written for crawlers.