Glossary

Plain explanations of SEO and AI search (GEO) terms.

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What are AI crawlers (bots)?AI crawlers are bots AI companies send to websites for model training, AI search, or reading a page on a user's request.
What are Core Web Vitals?Core Web Vitals are the three metrics Google uses to measure page experience: loading (LCP), responsiveness (INP) and visual stability (CLS).
What are Google AI Overviews?AI Overviews are AI-generated summary answers, with source links, that Google shows above the results for some searches.
What are impressions?An impression is each time a link to your site appears in someone's search results, whether or not it's clicked.
What are nofollow and dofollow links?Nofollow is a rel value asking search engines not to count a link as an endorsement; ordinary links without it are called dofollow.
What are noindex and the robots meta tag?noindex is a directive, given in the robots meta tag or an HTTP header, that tells search engines not to include a page in their index.
What are Open Graph tags?Open Graph tags are meta tags that set the title, description and image shown when a link is shared on social media or in messaging apps.
What is a 301 redirect?A 301 redirect is the HTTP response that tells browsers and search engines a URL has moved permanently to another address.
What is a backlink?A backlink is a link from another website to yours; it is one of the strongest authority signals search engines use.
What is a broken link (404)?A broken link points to a page that no longer exists and returns an error code such as 404 when clicked.
What is a canonical tag?A canonical tag is an HTML tag that tells search engines which of several URLs with the same or very similar content is the main version.
What is a content gap?A content gap is the set of keywords and topics your competitors rank for while you don't appear at all.
What is a keyword?A keyword is a word or phrase people type into a search engine, and the one you want a page to show up for.
What is a long-tail keyword?A long-tail keyword is a longer, more specific search phrase, usually three or more words, with lower volume but clearer intent.
What is a meta description?A meta description is the HTML tag that summarizes a page in a sentence or two and can appear under the title in search results.
What is a redirect chain?A redirect chain is when a URL passes through two or more redirects before reaching its final destination.
What is a referring domain?A referring domain is a unique domain that gives your site at least one backlink; all links from the same site count as one domain.
What is a SERP?A SERP (search engine results page) is the page of results a search engine shows when you run a search.
What is a soft 404?A soft 404 is a page that returns 200 (success) but that Google judges, from its content, to be empty or a “not found” page.
What is a title tag?The title tag is the page title defined with <title> in the HTML, usually shown as the clickable blue headline in search results.
What is a toxic link?A toxic link is a backlink from a spammy or low-quality site that may bring risk rather than benefit.
What is AI visibility?AI visibility measures how often AI assistants mention your brand or cite your site when answering relevant questions.
What is alt text?Alt text is a short description of what an image shows, written in the alt attribute of the img tag.
What is an internal link?An internal link points from one page to another page on the same site; it shows visitors and search engines how the site is structured.
What is an XML sitemap?An XML sitemap is a file that lists the URLs on your site you want search engines to index.
What is anchor text?Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a link; it gives a strong hint about what the target page is about.
What is average position?Average position is the mean ranking at which a page or site appeared in search results over a period.
What is click-through rate (CTR)?Click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of times your page was clicked out of every time it appeared in search results.
What is CLS?CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) is a score for how much page elements move unexpectedly while the page loads and is used.
What is crawl budget?Crawl budget is the number of pages Googlebot can and wants to crawl on your site within a given time.
What is disavow?Disavow is a text file and Search Console tool you use to ask Google to ignore specific backlinks or domains when assessing your site.
What is duplicate content?Duplicate content is the same or very similar text published at more than one URL, which makes it unclear which page a search engine should show.
What is E-E-A-T?E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust, the framework Google uses when assessing content quality.
What is GEO (generative engine optimization)?GEO is the work of getting your brand mentioned and your site cited in the answers of AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity.
What is heading hierarchy (H1–H6)?Heading hierarchy is the logical order of a page's H1 to H6 headings, arranging the topic into a main heading and subheadings.
What is hreflang?Hreflang is a tag that links a page's language or country versions together and tells search engines which version to show to which user.
What is indexing?Indexing is when a search engine stores a crawled page in its database so it can appear in search results.
What is IndexNow?IndexNow is an open protocol that instantly notifies participating search engines about new, changed or deleted pages.
What is INP?INP (Interaction to Next Paint) is the time from a user's click, tap or key press until the page updates the screen.
What is JSON-LD?JSON-LD is the markup format Google recommends for structured data: a JSON object in its own script block, separate from the page's visible HTML.
What is keyword difficulty (KD)?Keyword difficulty (KD) is a 0–100 score estimating how hard it is to reach Google's first page for a keyword.
What is LCP?LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) is the time until the largest image or text block in the visible area of a page is rendered.
What is llms.txt?llms.txt is a Markdown file at the site root that summarises for AI assistants what the site is and which pages matter most.
What is local SEO?Local SEO is the work of getting a business with a physical location or service area to rank high in Google Maps and near-me searches.
What is NAP consistency?NAP consistency means writing the business name, address and phone number exactly the same on the site, the Google Business Profile and other listings.
What is organic traffic?Organic traffic is the visitors who reach your site by clicking a non-ad result in a search engine.
What is robots.txt?robots.txt is a plain-text file in a site's root that tells search engine and AI bots which paths they may crawl.
What is search intent?Search intent is the goal behind a query: learning something, reaching a specific site, comparing options or buying.
What is search volume?Search volume is the estimated number of times a keyword is searched per month in a given country and language.
What is SEO?SEO (search engine optimization) is the work of making a site more visible in the unpaid results of search engines like Google.
What is structured data (schema)?Structured data is machine-readable markup, based on the schema.org vocabulary, that tells search engines what the information on a page actually is.
What is thin content?Thin content is page content that doesn't adequately answer the user's question: very short, or without original value.