The Search Matrix: Advanced SEO Training for the Age of AI

Who is this training for?

Developed by Sitebulb in partnership with DemandSphere and iPullRank, this webinar series is aimed at SEOs with an intermediate knowledge of technical SEO, and provides practical, technical insights on how AI and SEO intersect.

Note: All attendees get access to a 60-day free trial of Sitebulb! You will be sent the link to register for the free trial via email.

What this series covers:

Module 1: Technical Foundations & Setup

You’ll learn how modern search systems actually work, and why traditional SEO alone is no longer enough.

• How search has shifted from keyword matching to semantic, vector-based retrieval

• What retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is and why it underpins AI search

• Why AI systems retrieve and rank passages, not pages

• How hybrid retrieval blends lexical and semantic search

• What “relevance engineering” means — and how it differs from classic SEO

• Why visibility now depends on being understood, not just indexed

• The continued importance of core technical SEO foundations:

  • Site architecture & internal linking

  • Entity mapping & structured data

  • Crawlability

  • Rendering

  • Performance

Module 2: AI Search Understanding & Measurement

This module focuses on how to track visibility and performance when rankings and traffic alone no longer tell the full story.

• Why traditional SEO metrics don’t fully capture AI search visibility

• The new measurement framework for AI search:

• Input metrics (passage relevance, entity salience, bot activity)

• Channel metrics (share of voice, citation rate, citation quality)

• Performance metrics (engagement, conversions, outcomes)

• How AI systems generate synthetic fan-out queries

• Why citations matter more than rankings in generative results

• How AI crawlers access, render, and interpret your content

• What bot behaviour, indexing patterns, and crawl data reveal about AI visibility

• How to start benchmarking and tracking AI discovery over time

Module 3: Optimization & Advanced Topics

The final module goes deeper into why good content gets excluded, how to optimize for selection and synthesis, and what’s coming next.

• Why AI slop and index pollution are increasing — and why quality still wins

• Why AI-generated content isn’t inherently penalised, but low-value content is

• How AI systems decide what content is safe to retrieve and synthesize

• Why extractability is the first gate to AI visibility

• How to structure content into self-contained, citable chunks

• Why evidence density, scope clarity, freshness, and corroboration matter

• How to optimise content at the passage level, not just the page level

• How routing logic determines which formats (text, UGC, APIs, data) get surfaced

• The role of entity-rich language, semantic triples, and structured data in RAG

• How to use log files to understand AI crawler behaviour

• Why rendering, JavaScript handling, and performance are make-or-break for AI bots

• How to prepare for agentic search, APIs, Machine Context Protocols (MCP), and machine-readable endpoints

So, step inside The Search Matrix! Learn from industry leaders as we decode how LLMs crawl, interpret, and cite the web — and what that means for your SEO strategy.