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SEO, AEO and GEO glossary
Plain language definitions of the search and AI visibility terms you will meet when you work on your website.
- Plain language
- Searchable
- Updated regularly
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)
- Structuring content so search engines and AI assistants can lift a clear, direct answer from it.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)
- Making content easy for generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity to find, understand and cite.
- AI crawler
- A bot run by an AI company that reads web pages, either to power search answers or to train models. Examples include OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot.
- Backlink
- A link from another website to yours. Links from relevant, trusted sites are a strong signal.
- Breadcrumb
- A trail of links, such as Home / Services / SEO, that shows where a page sits in the site.
- Canonical URL
- The preferred address of a page when the same content is reachable at more than one URL.
- Core Web Vitals
- Google page experience metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (loading), Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness) and Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability).
- Crawl budget
- The number of pages a search engine is willing and able to crawl on a site in a given period.
- E-E-A-T
- Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust. Guidelines Google uses to describe helpful, reliable content.
- Entity
- A distinct thing, such as a company, person or place, that search engines can identify and relate to other things.
- Featured snippet
- A highlighted answer shown at the top of some Google results, taken from a web page.
- hreflang
- An attribute that tells search engines which language or region a page version is meant for.
- Indexing
- The process of storing a page so that it can appear in search results.
- Internal link
- A link from one page of a site to another page of the same site.
- JSON-LD
- The format Google recommends for structured data. It sits in a script tag and describes the page to machines.
- llms.txt
- A proposed plain text file at the site root that lists the most useful pages for language models. Support varies and it is not a ranking factor.
- Local pack
- The map and three business listings Google shows for local searches.
- Meta description
- A short summary of a page that search engines may show under the title in results.
- noindex
- An instruction that asks search engines not to include a page in their index.
- robots.txt
- A file at the site root that tells crawlers which parts of a site they may crawl.
- Schema markup
- Structured data vocabulary from schema.org used to label what content on a page means.
- Search intent
- The goal behind a search, for example to learn, compare, buy or find a place.
- SERP
- Search engine results page, the page of results shown after a search.
- Sitemap
- An XML file that lists the important URLs of a site for search engines.
- Title tag
- The page title shown in browser tabs and as the main link in search results.
- Zero-click search
- A search where the user gets the answer on the results page and does not visit a website.
Common questions
Why a glossary?
Search and AI terms change quickly. These short definitions explain the terms we use in our guides and tools.
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