*SEO Week day 1 thought #5.*

Krishna Madhavan – Microsoft

The index behind Bing search and AI is *not* a simple list of pages and it’s *not* a copy of the web. The search index is a transformed, multi-dimensional representation of content, structure, relationships and trust signals, built to be queried at millisecond speed. Search and grounding share a common early pipeline, but then split: search focuses on assembling a results page for a human to choose from, while grounding focuses on assembling enough reliable evidence for an AI to safely generate an answer or complete a task on the searcher’s behalf.