AI and SEO: A Marriage Made in Heaven or Hell?

Since their inception, search engines have gone from being basic search agents to sophisticated algorithms based on the artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). These innovative technologies affect the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) space from two completely opposite perspectives. On the one hand, it has become much more challenging to promote websites and push them to the top of SERP due to new AI-based ranking algorithms able to perform a very in-depth scan beyond meta. On the other hand, as the overall quality of search results has improved significantly, it is more difficult now to manipulate them using different kludges and black hat practices (albeit still possible which I'll show you below) . All in all, artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed the approach to SEO.