AEO
Answer engine optimization
Structuring content so AI assistants and search features can lift it as a direct answer. Rewards clear definitions, specific facts and structured data. Learn more.
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SEO and AI glossaryThe SEO and AI glossary, in plain English.
60 terms you will hear from developers, SEOs and AI people, each explained in a sentence or two. Search it, link to it, send it to your team.
This glossary defines the core terms of technical SEO and AI search, including crawling, indexing, structured data, Core Web Vitals, answer engine optimization, generative engine optimization, AI crawlers and llms.txt, in short plain-English definitions.
60 terms
AI crawler
A bot operated by an AI company that fetches web pages, either to train models (like GPTBot) or to answer live questions and cite sources (like OAI-SearchBot). Learn more.
AI Overview
An AI-generated summary Google shows at the top of some search results, with links to the sources it drew from. Learn more.
AI agent
Agentic AI
Software that takes actions for a user, such as researching vendors, filling forms or booking appointments, instead of only answering questions. Learn more.
Alt text
A text description of an image in the alt attribute. Used by screen readers and by search engines to understand images.
Anchor text
The clickable words of a link. It tells people and search engines what the linked page is about. Learn more.
Answer engine
A search tool that responds with a written answer instead of a list of links, such as ChatGPT search, Perplexity or Google AI Mode.
Backlink
A link from another website to yours. Links from relevant, trusted sites are a strong signal of authority.
Bingbot
Microsoft's web crawler for Bing. Bing's index also feeds several AI tools, including Microsoft Copilot.
Breadcrumb
A navigation trail showing where a page sits in a site's hierarchy. BreadcrumbList schema describes it to search engines.
Canonical URL
The preferred version of a page when several URLs show the same content, declared with a rel=canonical link.
Citation (AI)
A link or source reference an AI answer shows for information it used. Being cited is the AI-era version of ranking. Learn more.
ClaudeBot
Anthropic's web crawler. Anthropic also documents separate agents for search and user-initiated fetching. Learn more.
CLS
Cumulative Layout Shift
A Core Web Vitals metric for unexpected layout movement. Good is 0.1 or less. Learn more.
Core Web Vitals
Google's set of real-user metrics for loading (LCP), responsiveness (INP) and visual stability (CLS). Learn more.
Crawl budget
How many URLs a search engine is able and willing to crawl on a site in a given time. Matters mostly for very large sites.
Crawling
The process of bots fetching web pages and following links to discover more pages. Learn more.
E-E-A-T
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness
The qualities Google's quality rater guidelines use to evaluate content. Trust is the most important of the four.
Entity
A distinct, identifiable thing, such as a business, person, place or product, that search engines and AI models recognize and connect to facts.
Featured snippet
A highlighted excerpt Google sometimes shows at the top of results to answer a query directly.
GEO
Generative engine optimization
The practice of earning visibility and citations inside AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Learn more.
Google Business Profile
GBP
Google's free listing for local businesses that appears in Maps and the local pack. Learn more.
Google-Extended
A robots.txt control token that lets sites choose whether Google may use their content for Gemini and related AI training and grounding. It does not affect Google Search. Learn more.
Googlebot
Google's main web crawler for Search.
GPTBot
OpenAI's crawler for collecting training data. Separate from OAI-SearchBot, which supports ChatGPT search. Learn more.
Headless browser
A browser without a visible window, used by search engines and testing tools to render pages and run JavaScript. Learn more.
Hreflang
An attribute that tells search engines which language or regional version of a page to show.
Index
The database of pages a search engine has stored and can show in results.
INP
Interaction to Next Paint
A Core Web Vitals metric for how quickly a page responds to user input. Good is 200 milliseconds or less. Learn more.
Internal link
A link from one page to another on the same site. It helps discovery and signals which pages matter. Learn more.
JSON-LD
The script-based format Google recommends for structured data, written as JSON inside a script tag. Learn more.
Knowledge Graph
Google's database of entities and the facts connecting them, which powers knowledge panels and informs AI features.
LCP
Largest Contentful Paint
A Core Web Vitals metric for when the main content finishes loading. Good is 2.5 seconds or less. Learn more.
LLM
Large language model
An AI model trained on large amounts of text that can generate and understand language, such as the models behind ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.
llms.txt
A proposed Markdown file at a site's root that summarizes the site for language models and links to key pages. Learn more.
Local pack
Map pack
The block of three map listings Google shows for local searches. Learn more.
Meta description
A short summary of a page in its HTML head. Search engines may show it as the snippet under the title.
Noindex
A robots meta tag or header telling search engines not to include a page in their index.
OAI-SearchBot
OpenAI's crawler for surfacing websites in ChatGPT search results. Learn more.
Orphan page
A page with no internal links pointing to it. Learn more.
PerplexityBot
Perplexity's crawler for building the index that powers its cited answers. Learn more.
Programmatic SEO
Creating many search-targeted pages from a template and a structured dataset. Learn more.
Prompt
The question or instruction a user gives an AI model. Prompts are the new search queries.
Query fan-out
A technique where an AI search system breaks one question into many related searches, then combines the results into one answer.
RAG
Retrieval-augmented generation
A method where an AI system retrieves relevant documents first, then generates an answer grounded in them. Most AI search works this way.
Redirect (301)
A permanent redirect sending visitors and search engines from an old URL to a new one, passing along its signals.
Rendering
Running a page's code, especially JavaScript, to produce the final content a user sees. Learn more.
Rich result
A search result with extra visual features, such as stars, FAQs, prices or images, often powered by structured data.
robots.txt
A text file at a site's root that tells crawlers which paths they may access. Defined in RFC 9309. Learn more.
Schema.org
The shared vocabulary of types and properties used to write structured data, maintained by the major search engines. Learn more.
Search intent
What the searcher actually wants: information, a specific site, a comparison or a purchase.
SERP
Search engine results page
The page of results a search engine shows for a query.
Server-side rendering
SSR
Generating a page's HTML on the server so it arrives complete, rather than building it in the browser. Learn more.
Sitemap (XML)
A file listing the URLs a site wants search engines to know about, often with last-modified dates.
Speakable
A schema property marking sections of a page that are suited to text-to-speech, such as for voice assistants.
Static site
A site served as pre-built HTML files. Fast, secure and easy for any crawler to read. Learn more.
Structured data
Code, usually JSON-LD, that describes a page's content in a standard format so machines can understand it precisely. Learn more.
Technical SEO
The work of making a site crawlable, renderable, indexable, fast and well structured for search engines. Learn more.
Title tag
The HTML title of a page, usually shown as the clickable headline in search results.
Zero-click search
A search where the user gets an answer on the results page or in an AI response and does not click through to a website. Learn more.
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