*SEO Week day 1 thought #2.*

Krishna Madhavan – Microsoft/Bing

Most of the AI visibility battle happens before ranking: in *query understanding* and *query fan-out*. When a user types a query, the system rewrites it in several ways, normalizes vague phrases like “this year” into specific dates or context, expands it into related intents, and fans out down multiple paths. *Retrieval* then happens across those many variants, not just the literal string the user typed. If content only aligns with a single phrasing, it is not retrieved in many of the fan outs where AI systems pick the candidates.