There is some speculation in certain SEO groups and forums that Google has launched a new algorithm that is better than BERT and RankBrain named SMITH. SMITH stands for Siamese Multi-depth Transformer-based Hierarchical (SMITH) Encoder. This is not live, it is currently just a research paper from Google. Danny Sullivan from Google confirmed this for us on Twitter saying “No. We did not” launch SMITH in production.

Here are those tweets:

The speculation does not come from Roger Montti who wrote about the research paper. He just covered the recently published a research paper but he did not say it is in production use. In fact, Roger wrote that it would be “purely speculative to say whether or not it is in use.” The paper was first submitted on April 26, 2020 and then version two was published on October 13, 2020.

I believe the speculation comes from some Black Hat World forum threads where some are seeing ranking changes and claiming it has to do with SMITH. Google has never said it launched SMITH in production search yet.

What is SMITH? Here is the abstract below but it seems like SMITH improves on BERT where it can understand language more in “long-form document matching” versus “short text like a few sentences or one paragraph” where BERT shines.

Roger wrote an article on what he thinks it is. Roger said “SMITH is a new model for trying to understand entire documents. Models such as BERT are trained to understand words within the context of sentences. In a very simplified description, the SMITH model is trained to understand passages within the context of the entire document.” In fact, the Google researchers said SMITH increases the maximum input text length from 512 to 2048.

Folks in the forums are saying “Bert Smith update gone by yesterday,” when talking about ranking changes on their site. Another said “Google’s new SMITH algorithm understands long form content better than BERT. Maybe this one is affecting to some site.”

So no, there is no evidence that Google launched SMITH in production. And Google has confirmed that it did not launch SMITH in search.

And an old reminder, just because Google has a patent or research paper, it does not mean they are, have or will ever use it.

Yes, Danny Sullivan of Google said it in 2021:

Forum discussion at Black Hat World.