Glossary
Glossary of SEO and AI search
The terms we use every day, explained in a sentence or two without unnecessary jargon: from crawling and indexing to GEO, RAG and query fan-out. Use the A–Z index to jump to each letter.
A
AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)
Practices that help your content be chosen as the direct answer in featured snippets, voice assistants and AI-generated answers. It prioritises clear, concise, well-structured answers. See AEO.
AI crawlers
Bots that crawl the web to train models or to fetch information in real time, such as OpenAI's GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or ClaudeBot. They can be allowed or blocked in robots.txt depending on your goals.
AI Mode
Google's conversational search experience powered by generative AI, where users can ask complex and follow-up questions and receive answers with links to sources.
AI Overviews
AI-generated summaries Google shows at the top of some search results, with links to the sources used. Being cited in them has become a visibility goal in its own right.
Alt text
A text alternative to an image, set in the alt attribute. It makes images accessible to screen readers and helps search engines understand what they show.
Anchor text
The visible, clickable text of a link. It helps search engines and users understand what the destination page is about; descriptive text beats "click here".
B
Backlink
A link from another website to yours. Relevant, editorially given links remain one of the most important authority signals for search engines.
Bing Webmaster Tools
Microsoft's free tool for monitoring a site's presence in Bing. It also matters because several AI assistants use Bing's index to search the web.
Branded search
A query that includes your brand or company name. Growth in branded searches is a good indicator of brand awareness and often converts very well.
Breadcrumbs
A navigation trail showing where a page sits in the site hierarchy. They improve usability, reinforce internal linking and can be marked up with structured data.
C
Cannibalisation
When several pages on the same site compete for the same search intent, splitting signals and confusing search engines. It's resolved by merging, differentiating or canonicalising content.
Canonical tag
A rel="canonical" tag indicating the preferred version of a page when several URLs carry the same or very similar content. It's a hint, not a directive: Google may choose another canonical if signals conflict.
Citation (local)
A mention of a business's name, address and phone number in directories, guides or third-party sites. Consistent citations reinforce confidence in the business's location for local SEO.
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)
The Core Web Vitals metric for visual stability: how much elements shift unexpectedly while the page loads. A value of 0.1 or less is considered good.
Consent Mode
Google's mechanism that adapts how Analytics and Ads tags behave according to user consent. Version 2 is what Google requires for certain advertising features with users in the European Economic Area. See GA4 and Consent Mode v2.
Conversion
A valuable action a user takes on your site, such as submitting a form, calling, booking or buying. It's the metric that connects SEO to business results.
Core Web Vitals
Google's set of user experience metrics: LCP (loading), INP (interactivity) and CLS (visual stability). They're assessed on real-user data at the 75th percentile. See Core Web Vitals explained.
Crawl budget
The number of URLs a search engine is willing and able to crawl on a site within a given period. It matters mainly on large sites with many URLs generated by filters or parameters.
Crawling
The process by which search engine bots discover and download pages by following links and sitemaps. It's the first step towards a page appearing in results.
CTR (click-through rate)
The percentage of impressions that result in a click. In SEO it depends on position, title and description, and on the other features shown on the results page.
D
Digital PR
A public relations approach aimed at earning mentions and links in relevant media and websites through newsworthy stories, data or resources. See link building and digital PR.
Domain authority
A generic name for third-party metrics (from tools such as Ahrefs, Moz or Semrush) estimating the strength of a site's link profile. They aren't Google metrics and should only be used as a comparative reference.
Duplicate content
Identical or near-identical content available at several URLs, within one site or across sites. It rarely triggers penalties, but it dilutes signals and can lead to the wrong version being indexed.
E
E-E-A-T
Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust: concepts from Google's quality rater guidelines used to assess how reliable a piece of content and its author are. Trust is the most important. See our E-E-A-T guide.
Embeddings
Numerical representations of the meaning of a text that let search and AI systems compare content by semantic similarity, not just by matching words.
Entity
A unique, well-defined thing or concept (a person, company, place or product) that search engines identify and relate to others. Modern SEO works with entities, not just keywords.
Entity SEO
Work to ensure search engines and AI models correctly identify your brand as an entity, with consistent data, clear relationships and a presence in reference sources. See entity SEO.
F
Featured snippet
A highlighted block at the top of some Google results that extracts a direct answer from a page, as a paragraph, list or table.
G
GA4 (Google Analytics 4)
The current version of Google Analytics, based on events rather than sessions. It measures conversions, journeys and traffic sources and integrates with Search Console and Google Ads.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)
Practices that help a brand and its content be retrieved, understood and cited by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or AI Overviews. See Generative Engine Optimization.
Google Business Profile
Google's free business listing that appears on Google Maps and in local results. Optimising it and managing reviews are the foundation of local SEO.
Google Search Console
Google's free tool showing how the search engine sees your site: queries, clicks, impressions, indexing status, errors and page experience. It's the most reliable source of SEO data.
Googlebot
Google's crawler, which discovers and downloads pages for indexing. It crawls mostly with a smartphone user agent.
Grounding
The process by which a language model bases its answer on external sources retrieved in real time, rather than only on what it learned in training. It's what allows an assistant to cite your site.
H
Hallucination
An answer from a language model that sounds plausible but is wrong or made up. Clear, consistent and verifiable information about your company on the web reduces the risk of an assistant saying false things about it.
Hreflang
An attribute telling search engines which version of a page is intended for each language and region, so the right one is shown to each user. Annotations must be reciprocal. See multilingual SEO and hreflang.
HTTP status code
The number a server returns when a URL is requested: 200 (OK), 301 (permanent redirect), 302 (temporary), 404 (not found), 410 (gone) or 5xx (server error), among others. It determines how search engines treat each URL.
HTTPS
A secure protocol that encrypts communication between browser and server. It's a basic trust requirement and a page experience signal for Google.
I
Indexing
The process by which a search engine analyses a crawled page and stores it in its index so it can be shown in results. A crawled page isn't necessarily indexed.
INP (Interaction to Next Paint)
The Core Web Vitals metric for a page's responsiveness to user interactions. It replaced FID in March 2024 and is considered good at 200 ms or less.
Internal linking
Links between pages on the same site. They distribute authority, help search engines discover and contextualise content and guide users to important pages.
J
JavaScript SEO
The discipline of ensuring that JavaScript-generated content can be crawled, rendered and indexed. It's especially important because many AI crawlers don't execute JavaScript.
K
Keyword
A term or phrase users type or say into a search engine. Today keywords are grouped by intent and topic rather than optimised one by one.
Knowledge Graph
Google's knowledge base storing entities and the relationships between them. It powers knowledge panels and helps the search engine understand what a query refers to.
Knowledge panel
An information box Google shows about an entity (a company, person or place), drawing on its Knowledge Graph and other sources.
L
LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)
The Core Web Vitals metric for how long the largest visible content element takes to render. It's considered good at 2.5 seconds or less.
Link building
Techniques for earning links from other sites to yours. Bought or artificial links breach Google's guidelines; the sustainable approach relies on content and relationships worth linking to.
Link profile
The set of external links pointing to a site, analysed by quantity, quality, topical relevance, domain diversity and anchor text.
LLM (large language model)
An artificial intelligence model trained on large amounts of text to understand and generate language. It's the technology behind assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude.
llms.txt
A proposed standard: a text file at the site root with a summary and links to the content most relevant to language models. It's a voluntary initiative and its use by the main AI systems hasn't been broadly confirmed.
Local pack
A block of Google results with a map and several local businesses, shown for searches with geographic intent. It draws mainly on Google Business Profile listings.
Local SEO
Optimisation for searches with geographic intent, on Google Maps and in the local pack: business profile, reviews, citations and location pages. See local SEO.
Long tail
Longer, more specific searches with less individual volume but which together make up a large share of demand. They usually carry clearer intent and convert better.
M
Meta description
An HTML tag summarising a page's content. It isn't a direct ranking factor, but Google may use it as the snippet in results and it influences CTR.
Meta robots
A tag or HTTP header giving search engines instructions about a specific page, such as noindex (don't index) or nofollow (don't follow links).
Mobile-first indexing
Google's practice of primarily using the mobile version of a page to crawl, index and rank it. Anything missing from the mobile version may not be taken into account.
N
NAP
Short for name, address, phone. Keeping these details identical across your site, business profile and directories is fundamental to local SEO.
Nofollow, sponsored and ugc
rel attributes that qualify a link: sponsored for paid links, ugc for user-generated content and nofollow for other cases where you don't want to endorse the destination. Google treats them as hints.
O
Off-page SEO
Actions outside your site that influence its visibility, mainly links, brand mentions, reviews and presence on other platforms.
On-page SEO
Optimising each page's elements (content, titles, headings, internal links, images and structured data) so that they match search intent.
Organic traffic
Visits arriving from search engines' unpaid results. Its real value depends on the visitor's intent and whether they convert.
P
PageSpeed Insights
Google's free tool showing real-user Core Web Vitals data (where enough exists) and a lab analysis with performance recommendations for a URL.
Pagination
Splitting a long list (products, articles) across several pages. It should be implemented with crawlable links so search engines can discover every item.
People Also Ask
A Google feature listing related questions that expand to show a short answer and a link. It's a good source for discovering your audience's real questions.
Programmatic SEO
Creating many pages from a template and a database to cover searches that share a pattern. It only works if each page offers unique, useful information. See our programmatic SEO guide.
Prompt
An instruction or question a user gives an AI assistant. AI visibility is measured using sets of prompts that represent your customers' questions.
Q
Query fan-out
A technique in which an AI search system breaks a question into multiple related sub-queries, searches for each and combines the information into a single answer.
R
RAG (retrieval-augmented generation)
An architecture in which a language model retrieves relevant documents from an index before generating its answer. It's how many assistants consult and cite web pages.
Redirect (301)
A permanent redirect from one URL to another. It's the recommended way to preserve a page's signals when its address changes, for example during a migration.
Rendering
Executing a page's code (including JavaScript) to produce the final content the user sees. Google renders in a second phase; many other crawlers don't render at all.
Rich results
Search results with extra elements such as ratings, prices, questions or images, usually enabled by structured data. Google decides when to show them.
Robots.txt
A file at the domain root telling crawlers which paths they may or may not crawl. Blocking crawling doesn't guarantee a URL won't be indexed; noindex does that.
S
Schema.org
A vocabulary shared by the major search engines for describing entities and content with structured data: Organization, LocalBusiness, Product, Article, FAQPage and many more.
Search intent
The goal behind a query: to learn, compare, buy or reach a specific site or place. Aligning each page with a clear intent is fundamental to ranking and converting.
SEO migration
Any significant change to a site (domain, CMS, URL structure, design or protocol) managed to preserve organic visibility, mainly through a redirect plan and validation. See SEO migrations.
SERP
Search engine results page: today it includes not just organic links but ads, maps, AI Overviews, videos, images and other modules.
Site architecture
The hierarchical organisation of a site's pages and the links between them. Good architecture eases crawling, distributes internal authority and helps users find what they need in a few clicks.
Soft 404
A page that returns a 200 status code but actually has no useful content or shows a "not found" message. Search engines treat it as an error and it wastes crawling.
Structured data
Code, usually JSON-LD using the Schema.org vocabulary, that explicitly describes a page's content (organisation, product, article, FAQ…). It helps machines understand the page and can enable rich results.
T
Technical SEO
The part of SEO that ensures a site can be crawled, rendered, indexed and understood: architecture, speed, structured data, hreflang, redirects and more. See technical SEO.
Thin content
Pages with little value for users: very short text, unreviewed auto-generated copy, scraped content or pages that meet no real need. They can weigh down how the whole site is assessed.
Title tag
The HTML tag that defines a page's title. It's one of the most important on-page elements and is usually shown as the headline in search results.
Topic cluster
A set of interlinked content covering a topic in depth: a main pillar page and several supporting pages linked to each other. It strengthens the site's topical relevance.
X
XML sitemap
A file listing a site's indexable URLs to help search engines discover them. It should only include canonical URLs returning a 200 status.
Y
YMYL (Your Money or Your Life)
Topics that can affect people's health, safety, finances or wellbeing. Google applies stricter quality and trust standards to this kind of content.
Z
Zero-click search
A search resolved directly on the results page or in an assistant's answer, without the user visiting any website. It means visibility has to be measured, not just clicks.
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