Semantic search is the ability of search engines to understand the intent, context, and meaning of a query — and the content of webpages — beyond literal keyword matching. Google’s algorithms, particularly BERT and MUM, use natural language processing to interpret what a user is actually looking for and match it with content that best satisfies that need. For content creators, semantic search means writing comprehensively about a topic with related concepts and natural language, rather than optimizing for exact-match keywords.