Relevance Engineering
A cross-surface discipline combining information retrieval, AI, content strategy, UX and digital PR to improve relevance and visibility. Coined by Mike King of iPullRank in 2025.
What it actually means
King's argument is that SEO drifted into a checklist trade while the systems it targets became information-retrieval problems, and that practitioners need to work from how retrieval actually functions rather than from folklore.
Relevance engineering is the reconstruction: embeddings, ranking behaviour and retrieval mechanics treated as the foundation, with content and PR as instruments rather than as the discipline itself.
Why the framing has traction
It restores a technical floor to a field that had largely stopped requiring one. Reasoning about why a passage is retrieved, in terms of how retrieval works, is a different activity from following best-practice lists.
The cost is accessibility. It asks for background most practitioners do not have, which is precisely the gap King is arguing needs closing.