NEW YORK, NY — October 27, 2025 — Michael King, Founder and CEO of iPullRank, has been named AI Search Marketer of the Year by Search Engine Land for 2025. This marks his second win and cements his position as one of the leading innovators in modern SEO and AI-driven search strategy.
Michael King continues to set a new benchmark for leadership in SEO. In April, he launched the inaugural SEO Week in New York City, a highly technical, forward-looking conference that brought together more than 40 of the industry’s top thinkers, creators, and engineers. The event went beyond entry-level presentations and featured practitioners shaping the next phase of search, including machine learning engineers, search product leads, in-house enterprise SEOs, and creative strategists. SEO Week introduced frameworks, challenged norms, and delivered experiments, live-coded demos, and data-backed insights on the future of search.
A central idea introduced during SEO Week was Relevance Engineering, a framework that merges content strategy, information retrieval, UX, digital PR, and AI. It reflects how modern search engines interpret meaning semantically and contextually. Relevance Engineering positions SEO as a technical marketing discipline built on language modeling, query understanding, and information gain. It is supported by measurable systems that include vector embeddings, cosine similarity, topic segmentation, and semantic scoring at scale.
King’s AI Mode article following Google I/O became the definitive breakdown of Google’s new AI Search experience. He unpacked patents, analyzed the mechanics of query fan-out, and explained how Google’s systems use personal context and multiple intent satisfaction to generate results.
In that article, he also introduced Qforia, a Gemini-powered tool he built to generate query fan-outs for AI Mode and AI Overviews, which inform the type of multi-model content SEOs need to create to earn more visibility in AI Search, helping marketers test and understand AI Search.
Building on that foundation, King and the iPullRank team launched The AI Search Manual. This comprehensive, multi-chapter publication documents the principles and methods driving visibility in conversational and AI Search. The Manual covers topics such as query fan-out, content resonance, measurement frameworks, and brand performance in AI Search environments. It has become a go-to resource for enterprise marketers and SEOs navigating the shift toward AI Search retrieval systems.
King’s philosophy has remained constant: take complex systems, decode them, and build tools that make them actionable. Through keynotes, prototypes, and research, he continues to push the field toward a more technical, evidence-based future.
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"First off: thank you. To the judges, to the community, to my team at iPullRank—the most brilliant, relentless crew in the game.
Winning this once was a statement. Winning it twice? That feels like legacy in motion.
I didn’t get here by playing safe. I got here by breaking things open. By questioning every assumption this industry ever handed me. SEO was never meant to be static. It was never about chasing 10 blue links. It was always about decoding how meaning moves through machines.
While everyone else was arguing over subdomains versus subdirectories and what to call AI Search, we were out here defining Relevance Engineering and building the bridge between AI and human intention. We weren't getting lucky, we were keeping our heads down and getting to work.
This moment isn’t just about me, it’s about what comes next. Because the future doesn’t wait. It doesn’t care who’s comfortable and cautious. It rewards the curious, the creative, the ones crazy enough to believe that search can be rewritten like code and poetry at the same time.
So to everyone watching: stop playing defense. Don’t wait for the next AI innovation or algorithm update to tell you who you are. Be the signal, not the noise.
The machines are learning from us. Let’s give them something worth learning.
Thank you and congratulations to all my fellow nominees and everyone in this space pushing the boundaries. The future’s already watching."
Under King’s leadership, iPullRank has developed the AI Search Strategy Program, designed for enterprise brands preparing for the next phase of search. The program includes:
- The Keyword Portfolio
- Omni-Media Content Audit
- Omni-Media Content Plan
- AI Search Measurement Plan
Enterprise marketers are encouraged to join the program before the end of the year to align with 2026 budgets and strategic initiatives.
Interested in developing your own AI Search strategy for your brand?
About iPullRank
iPullRank is a New York-based digital marketing agency that integrates Relevance Engineering, technical SEO, content strategy, and AI innovation to help enterprise brands achieve measurable visibility in both human and machine-driven search. The agency partners with Fortune 500 and high-growth companies across finance, eCommerce, and technology sectors to engineer relevance at scale.
