Google MUM Update: How new Google AI technology will change the face of SEO

Google has unveiled MUM, its latest technology that will enable the search engine to better understand content and search intent. Google itself says that MUM is a thousand times more powerful than its predecessor BERT, and will help Google better understand not only written text but also videos, images, and podcasts in 75 languages – taking it one step closer to a real conversation with users. What exactly will MUM mean for the webmaster and SEO community?

At the annual developer conference Google I/O in May 2021, Google announced that they were working on a new AI-based technology that goes by the name of MUM that will be a thousand times more powerful than their 2019 BERT update. The acronym MUM has nothing to do with mothers, though. It stands for ‘Multitask Unified Model’, a machine learning model that is not just better at understanding written text but, in fact, any kind of content. This multimodal approach means MUM can unlock information from different formats and make connections between different types of information, enabling Google to provide better answers to complex search queries.

Google described the concept behind MUM in a blogpost, saying that, for more complex queries, it usually takes around eight searches for a user to get the best result. MUM not only understands language, but also generates it and is trained in 75 languages, allowing it to develop a comprehensive understanding of information and world knowledge that will help it better interpret complex search queries in their specific context. MUM will also be able to reply in a more natural conversation-like manner, bringing Google closer to the conversational search experience they want to deliver, an aspiration they expressed when the Hummingbird update was launched eight years ago in 2013.

Leave a Comment