When ChatGPT captured the public imagination in early 2023, there was a scramble at many companies to launch “AI” features. It was easy to get caught up in the excitement, but sometimes the onslaught of AI tools felt like pyrotechnics at a concert — if the band is lousy, then it’s just light and noise.

Moz products have leveraged machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) for many years, but advances in large language models (LLMs) presented new opportunities — and risks. Our team decided two things early on. First, we would start learning and experimenting, but we would wait to release product features until we felt like we had real value to offer. Second, we would focus on enabling SEOs to do their jobs better and faster, what I like to call “Augmented Intelligence.” We want to enable your human intelligence and insights, not replace them.

Today, I’m excited to announce Moz AI – a new set of AI-enabled tools and features you’re going to see across our products. The first of these, available already, are two sets of features in the Moz Pro product suite: (1) Search Intent in Keyword Explorer and (2) domain snapshots in our Domain Overview tool. These are the first steps in our conscientious, value-first approach to AI.

Searchers arrive at our sites at many stages of their journey, from just starting to ask questions to needing to buy yesterday. This classic problem of funnel-based intent (Informational, Navigational, Commercial, and Transactional) can be surprisingly challenging, and we’ve honestly tabled it in the past due to results that just weren’t up to our standards.

Advances in NLP have opened up new avenues, and after a ton of modeling over the past few months, we’re launching Search Intent in Keyword Explorer. It looks something like this…

While LLM-powered tools like ChatGPT can try to approximate the intent of a query, what we really want to know is what Google thinks a searcher is looking for or, as SEOs, what kind of content we need to target to rank for that query, and best serve searchers.

Our Search Intent model uses a two-layer process: (1) a language-savvy ML classification model trained on our understanding of search intent, and (2) a rules-based model that encapsulates years of expertise and research about Google SERP signals.

While intent is a complicated concept, and the buyer’s journey can be a winding one, the four key search intents are an incredibly useful taxonomy for understanding where a searcher is on their path, what opportunities are present, and how to craft content for those opportunities.

Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen Google take a more aggressive approach to the mid-funnel and experiment with pushing searchers toward an action (or toward more effective advertising). Consider this “Buying Guide” on a search for “gaming laptops”…

This is a query that implies commercial intent, but where the buyer is still fairly early in their journey and probably not ready to make a transaction. By being able to quickly and easily segment this journey, you can target content effectively, avoiding wasted effort.

We hope to roll out Search Intent across more products in the coming months and to show you how to put it to work in your SEO and content workflows. We’d love to hear from you on how you’re putting this data to work to achieve tangible results.

We love big data, but sometimes, as the data piles up, it can feel like standing downhill from an avalanche. Some tasks, like prospecting and broad competitive research, require us to understand large data sets quickly.

Our Domain Overview tool now has two new insights: (1) Domain Search Theme and (2) Domain Keyword Topics. Both are driven by our extensive keyword ranking corpus. Take, for example, a Domain Overview for Edmunds.com…

Using language models across Edmunds.com’s Google rankings, we can give you a quick view of the overall search theme. Unlike a canned industry category, the Domain Search Theme gives you a dynamically-generated sense of how Google views any given site.

We also bucket the keyword avalanche into up to five Domain Keyword Topics…

Even if you knew nothing about Edmunds.com, you could quickly get a sense of what the site’s all about and for what kind of keywords it’s competing. Combined with our industry-leading metrics, like Domain Authority® and Brand Authority^TM, and our extensive keyword and links data, you can drive useful prospect research and competitive intelligence in minutes.

Moz takes the ethical challenges of AI, and LLMs in particular, seriously. It’s a big and quickly evolving topic, but we’ve tried to build these early features to augment and assist your own intelligence and creativity, building on our proprietary data.

In particular, we are mindful of the explosion of AI-driven content and of being responsible citizens of both the internet and the Google ecosystem. We want to help you create useful, impactful content that serves searchers and meets them along their journey.

Note that Google’s March 2024 Spam Update introduced a new set of policies, including penalties for “scaled content abuse.” In Google’s own words:

“Scaled content abuse is when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating Search rankings and not helping users. This abusive practice is typically focused on creating large amounts of unoriginal content that provides little to no value to users, no matter how it's created.

This new policy builds on our previous spam policy about automatically-generated content, ensuring that we can take action on scaled content abuse as needed, no matter whether content is produced through automation, human efforts, or some combination of human and automated processes.”

While Google has made it clear that this policy is not AI-specific, LLMs clearly make scaled content easier and, unfortunately, that makes abuse easier. Moz will continue to evaluate any new tools with full awareness of evolving Google policies and potential risks.

At Moz, we want to dig you out of the data avalanche and get you back to climbing. We believe that AI-enabled tools can make you even more results-oriented, impactful, and essential. With Search Intent, you can better target your content to the right audience at the right time. With our AI-enabled Domain Overview tools, you can drive real insights about competitors and prospects in record time, giving you more time to put those insights to work.

Even as we launch Moz AI, we’re iterating on these models, testing new tools, and putting next steps in action. We hope you’ll join us on this journey; let us know how we can better empower your work, and, yes, even let us know if we get it wrong from time to time.