Mike King

Mike King founded iPullRank and popularized relevance engineering as an organizing idea for technical teams entering AI search. The phrase gathers AI, information retrieval, UX, content strategy and digital PR into one practice rather than a pile of disconnected workstreams.

That bundling helps agencies staff projects. Instead of asking whether GEO is "just SEO" or "just PR," King's framing says the job is to make a brand relevant to the retrieval and ranking machinery that generative answers actually use.

The idea also helps buyers. A relevance-engineering brief is easier to evaluate than a vague promise to "do GEO," because it names the disciplines that must show up in the work.

King's patent reading habit is part of the brand. Technical audiences trust the fan-out explainers because they are grounded in documents rather than in reconstructed folklore from a single demo. That habit raised the evidence bar for conference GEO talks.

King was central to popularizing query fan-out, the sub-queries systems like Google's AI Mode run on a user's behalf. Understanding those hidden queries changes how teams map content: one user question may spawn many retrieval targets. His patent-based AI Mode explainer is the usual public entry point.

iPullRank's Qforia tool lets teams simulate fan-out patterns. The combination of patent-informed explainers and software is typical of King's style: show the mechanism, then give operators something to click.

For technical SEOs, that combo is why his conference talks often become homework. The slides explain the system; the tool lets a team test whether their content covers the fan-out space.

Relevance engineering also gives hiring language. Teams can staff IR literacy, content and PR under one program name instead of three orphaned workstreams fighting for budget.

When technical teams need a shared noun for GEO-adjacent work, relevance engineering is still one of the most useful labels in circulation.

Start with his patent-based explainer on how AI Mode and AI Overviews work. It is the clearest public entry into the fan-out conversation he helped lead, and it pairs naturally with a Qforia session afterward.

Qforia makes the fan-out idea sticky inside accounts because teams can see simulated sub-queries next to their content map. Tools that illustrate a mechanism usually change roadmaps faster than essays alone.