Mike King is founder and CEO of iPullRank, the technical SEO and content engineering agency he built after years as a developer and hip-hop artist. He popularized relevance engineering as a staffing idea for AI search, and iPullRank's public work on query fan-out and Qforia gives teams a way to simulate the sub-queries systems like Google's AI Mode run on a user's behalf.
From Hip-Hop to SEO
King's public origin story starts outside the agency world. He came up as a hip-hop artist and web developer before SEO became the full-time craft, a path he has described in interviews including a WeWork community profile.
He founded iPullRank in 2014 and built it into an enterprise technical SEO, content engineering, and relevance engineering practice. iPullRank publishes a free multi-chapter AI Search Manual. Kami Hess later joined as VP of Operations.
Defining Relevance Engineering
King gathers AI, information retrieval, UX, content strategy, and digital PR into one practice he calls relevance engineering. He presents the bundle as a way to staff projects, so teams can hire for a mix of retrieval literacy, content systems, and experimentation.
When King talks about AI search, he usually starts from how retrieval systems score and fetch passages, then works outward to content and entity work teams can schedule.
Query Fan-Out and Qforia
King was central to popularizing query fan-out for marketers: one user question may spawn many retrieval targets inside systems like AI Mode and AI Overviews. Understanding those hidden queries changes how teams map content. A page that answers only the head question can miss the synthetic sub-questions the system also runs.
iPullRank's Qforia experiment uses model APIs to help teams simulate fan-out style sub-queries and inspect which passages might matter. The tool is experimental and requires an API key.
Conferences and The Science of SEO
King remains a heavy conference presence and has been recognized as a Search Marketer of the Year. He has also been a go-to explainer when Google documentation or leaks need translation into practitioner language, including conversations about algorithm documentation that reshaped SEO debates.
His forthcoming book, The Science of SEO, sets out to explain how search and AI retrieval systems behave.