Artificial intelligence (AI)

How does the EU define an AI system?

Article 3 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, the AI Act, describes an AI system as a machine-based system designed to operate with varying levels of autonomy. It may adapt after deployment and infers from its input how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations or decisions. Those outputs can influence physical or virtual environments. The definition applies for the purposes of that regulation.

This is not legal advice.

Which parts are called AI?

IBM describes machine learning as the base, with deep learning, which uses multilayer neural networks, as a subset, and generative AI as models that create text, images or video on request. Today’s systems are narrow: each is built for specific tasks. A general artificial intelligence matching human ability, in IBM’s words, does not exist yet.

What does AI mean for SEO?

Search engines use AI in several places. Google shows AI Overviews and AI Mode, which summarize answers from web content. According to Google, there are no additional requirements to appear in them. The usual basics apply: pages must be indexed and eligible for snippets, and structured data should match the visible text. Controls such as nosnippet, noindex and robots.txt work as before.

Content teams also use AI tools to draft or edit text. Google has published separate guidance on that, covered under AI content detection.

Examples

• A chatbot such as ChatGPT or Claude answers a question in text.
• Google summarizes the results for a query in an AI Overview.
• A language model suggests title tags for a set of pages.

FAQ

What does the abbreviation AI stand for? Artificial intelligence. In German it is “KI”, for “Künstliche Intelligenz”.

Last updated: October 7, 2026