Editor's note: This in-depth companion to our top-level FAQ is a 30-minute read, so get comfortable! You'll learn the backstory and nuances of BERT's evolution, how the algorithm works to improve human language understanding for machines, and what it means for SEO and the Banner Design work we do every day. If you've been keeping an eye on Twitter SEO over the past week, you'll likely have noticed an increase in gifs and images featuring the Sesame Street character Bert (and sometimes Ernie). Banner Design Indeed, last week Google announced that an impending algorithmic update would be rolled out, affecting 10% of queries in search results and also affecting snippet results in countries where they were present; which is not unusual.
The update is called Google BERT Banner Design (hence the Sesame Street connection - and the gifs). Google describes BERT as the biggest change to its search system since the company introduced RankBrain nearly five years ago, and possibly one of the biggest search changes ever. News Banner Design of BERT's arrival and its impending impact has caused a stir in the SEO community, as well as some confusion about what BERT does and what it means for the industry as a whole. With that in mind, let's take a look at what BERT is, the journey of BERT, the need for BERT and the challenges it aims to solve, the Banner Design current situation (i.e. what it means for SEO) and where things could be headed. Quick links to subsections of this guide The history of BERT | How Search Engines Learn Language | Problems with language learning methods |
How BERT Improves Search Engine Language Understanding | What does BERT mean for SEO? What is BERT? BERT is a technologically breakthrough natural language processing model/framework that has taken the machine learning world by storm since it was published as an Banner Design academic research paper. The research paper is titled BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding (Devlin et al, 2018). Following the publication of an article, the Google AI research team announced BERT as an open source contribution. A year later, Google announced the rollout of Banner Design an algorithmic update to Google BERT in production search. Google linked the BERT algorithmic update to the BERT research paper, highlighting the importance of BERT for understanding contextual language in content and queries, and therefore intent, especially for conversational search.