Definition
Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that creates new content, such as text, images, or code, rather than just sorting or labeling existing data. It learns patterns from huge amounts of examples, then uses those patterns to produce answers that read as if a person wrote them. The large language models behind tools like AI chat assistants are the most common example.
Use Cases
Generative AI is used to answer questions, summarize documents, write drafts, and power the AI answers that now appear inside search. For website owners, it is the engine deciding which sources to pull from and quote when someone asks an AI assistant a question.
Why It Matters for SEO
Generative AI matters for SEO because it has created a whole new way for people to find information, where an assistant gives a direct answer instead of a list of links. Getting your content into those answers is the goal of AI answer inclusion, and it often relies on retrieval augmented generation to fetch trusted sources. Writing so these systems can lift your words is covered in our guide to content AI summaries pull from.
Related Concepts
Related concepts include retrieval augmented generation, query understanding, and large language models. Together they describe how an AI reads a question and builds an answer from the sources it trusts most.