Glossary
One-sentence definitions of the search, answer-engine and AI-visibility terms you will meet most often.
- AI Overview
- An AI-generated summary shown at the top of some Google results, with links to the web pages it drew from.
- Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
- Structuring content so search features and voice assistants can extract a direct answer from it.
- Canonical URL
- The single preferred address for a page, declared with <link rel="canonical"> so duplicates do not compete.
- Core Web Vitals
- Google’s user-experience metrics: Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift.
- Crawl budget
- The number of URLs a search engine is willing and able to crawl on a site in a given period.
- E-E-A-T
- Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness — the qualities Google’s quality raters use to judge content credibility.
- Entity
- A uniquely identifiable thing — a business, person, place or product — that search engines and AI models track as one concept.
- Featured snippet
- A highlighted answer block shown above or within Google results, quoting a passage from one web page.
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
- Making content easy for AI systems to find, understand and cite in generated answers.
- JSON-LD
- A JavaScript-notation format for adding schema.org structured data to a page inside a <script> tag.
- llms.txt
- A proposed Markdown file at the site root that summarises a website for large language models.
- People Also Ask
- An expandable box of related questions and short answers in Google results.
- Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
- An AI technique that fetches relevant documents first and then writes an answer grounded in them, often with citations.
- Robots.txt
- A text file at the site root that tells crawlers which paths they may fetch.
- sameAs
- A schema.org property listing official profiles of an entity, helping engines confirm they all refer to the same organisation.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Improving a website so search engines can crawl, understand and rank it for relevant searches.
- Structured data
- Machine-readable labels (usually schema.org in JSON-LD) that describe what a page and its content are.
- XML sitemap
- A file listing a site’s important URLs and their last-modified dates so crawlers can find them.
- Zero-click search
- A search where the user gets their answer on the results page and does not click through to any site.