iPullRank
Updated 2026-08-17Mike King's New York technical-SEO agency, repositioned around AI search under the banner of Relevance Engineering. Recent work: original research on 13.1 billion Google searches, a July 2026 reorg into three client tiers served by named engineering practices, and the open-source Qforia query fan-out tool.
Three scores, refreshed weekly from live market signals rather than a once-a-year analyst report. Presence is how established a vendor is in the market right now. Velocity is how fast they are shipping, raising, and winning customers. Agent Readiness is how easily your own agents can build on them through an API, MCP server, SDK, or CLI. Scores are relative across the vendors we track; the raw inputs ship in the downloadable dataset.
The Solution & Approach
iPullRank is a services firm, not a product. Its organizing frame is Relevance Engineering, Mike King's reframing of SEO as an engineering discipline of semantic relevance to retrieval systems rather than keyword mapping. The framework was introduced publicly at SMX Advanced in June 2025 and formally defined in "An Introduction to the Relevance Engineering Framework" a month earlier.
The agency built its position in AEO through publishing rather than shipping. The AI Search Manual, a 24-chapter public guide billed as "the official documentation for Relevance Engineering in AI Search," came out in August 2025. Qforia, a free Gemini-powered query fan-out simulator, was open-sourced in May 2025. King's May 2024 analysis of the leaked Google Search API documentation, which surfaced siteAuthority and NavBoost, remains the most-cited independent read of that leak. Named services now sit on top of the writing: an AI Search Strategic Roadmap, an AI Search Audit, and a click-to-citation measurement framework built on Cosine Similarity, a Comprehensive Coverage Index, and Strategic Entity Richness.
In July 2026 the frame became the org chart. iPullRank restructured delivery into three client tiers, Emerging, Growth, and Elite, served by Strategic Planning, Content Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Conversation Engineering, Creative, and Measurement Engineering practices. King's POV runs hot on the category: he argues single-shot RAG is obsolete and content must survive five gatekeepers in agentic pipelines, that AI search platforms are branding channels more than performance channels, and that bot traffic will exceed human traffic by 2027. The agency also hosts SEO Week, its annual New York conference, now in its second year.
Best for
Enterprise and mid-market brands that want AI-search work run as an engineering engagement, with original research and measurement frameworks rather than a dashboard subscription.
Pricing & trial
Pricing not public. Engagements are structured as three client tiers, Emerging, Growth, and Elite, plus ongoing consulting retainers.
Agent Experience
How you build on this platform (or wire it into your own agents):
| Surface | Available | Docs |
|---|---|---|
| API | No | — |
| MCP | No | — |
| SDK | No | — |
| CLI | No | — |
| llms.txt | No | — |
This is an agency, so there is no platform to build on, though iPullRank does maintain Qforia as an open-source query fan-out tool on GitHub.
Recent moves
- 2026-07-30Published original research on 13.1 billion Google search events from the Datos clickstream panel, finding 46.96% of searches end without a click and that ChatGPT is the 6th most-clicked destination from Google results. source
- 2026-07-16Reorganized agency delivery around AI search into three client tiers served by named practices including Content Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Conversation Engineering, and Measurement Engineering. source
- 2026-06-24Mike King argued on a Semrush-hosted Cannes Lions panel that AI search platforms function more as branding channels than performance channels. source
- 2026-06-12Published its SEO Week 2026 Day 4 recap, covering the "validation layer" concept and "Earned Architecture," a framework favoring third-party validation over owned content. source
- 2026-05-28Introduced "agentic chunking" as a named methodology, structuring content into single-idea paragraphs so AI retrieval systems can extract accurate answers. source
- 2026-05-26Mike King published "Machine Media: The Death of the Open Web," reporting AI bot traffic grew 187% in 2025 against 3.1% human growth and projecting bots to exceed humans by 2027. source
Company, Financials & Funding History
Founded and led by Mike King, who runs the firm out of New York. King wrote the first major independent analysis of the 2024 Google Search API leak, introduced Relevance Engineering at SMX Advanced in 2025, and has a book, The Science of SEO, forthcoming from Wiley.
Analyst placement
Search Engine Land named Mike King its 2025 AI Search Marketer of the Year, his second such award, citing SEO Week, the Relevance Engineering framework, the AI Search Manual, and Qforia. source