Glossary of SEO and AI search terms
The vocabulary of search and AI visibility, one or two sentences per term. Every entry carries an anchor, so a link can point straight at the definition you need.
- AEO (answer engine optimization)
- Shaping pages so that systems which reply with an answer rather than a list of links, from featured snippets to voice assistants to chatbots, can lift a passage and credit it.
- AI Overviews
- The generated summaries Google places on many results pages, citing the sites they borrowed from. AI Mode extends the idea into a back-and-forth conversation.
- Alt text
- Words attached to an image in the markup that describe it for people using screen readers and give crawlers a clue about the picture's subject.
- Anchor text
- The visible, clickable wording of a hyperlink. When it names the destination's topic, both readers and crawlers know what they'll find.
- Bing Webmaster Tools
- Microsoft's no-cost dashboard for owners, covering crawl, index, and keyword data from Bing, whose index also supplies Copilot and several other assistants.
- Canonical tag
- A line in a page's head nominating which address should represent a set of duplicate or close copies. Google weighs it heavily but may overrule it.
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)
- The Core Web Vital that scores how far things jump around on screen during loading. Aim for 0.1 or lower.
- Core Web Vitals
- Three experience scores Google tracks, LCP, INP, and CLS, taken from Chrome users over a rolling four weeks.
- Crawl budget
- The practical ceiling on how much of a site a search engine will fetch in a given stretch of time. A concern for very large sites and those spawning endless URL variants.
- Crawler
- Software that requests pages on its own to read them, such as Googlebot, Bingbot, GPTBot, or ClaudeBot. People also say bot or spider.
- Entity
- A single real-world thing, whether a company, person, place, or product, that search engines and AI models recognize as one concept however a page happens to phrase its name.
- Category filters for attributes like color, size, or price. Left open to crawlers, the combinations can balloon into millions of addresses.
- Field data
- Speed and responsiveness figures gathered from actual visits, as opposed to one synthetic test run on a single machine.
- GEO (generative engine optimization)
- Work aimed at how generative AI tools portray and cite a company or a page. In practice it overlaps almost entirely with AEO and AI SEO.
- Google Business Profile
- The free Google listing that puts a business on Maps and in local results, carrying its hours, categories, photos, and reviews.
- hreflang
- Markup that pairs each language or country edition of a page with the audience that should see it.
- Index
- The store of pages a search engine considers eligible for results. Nothing ranks until it's in there.
- IndexNow
- A shared ping system: when a page appears, changes, or disappears, the site tells Bing, Yandex, and other members right away instead of waiting for a recrawl.
- INP (Interaction to Next Paint)
- The Core Web Vital that times the gap between a tap, click, or keystroke and the screen's visible response. Aim for 200 ms or lower.
- JSON-LD
- Google's preferred way to write structured data: a JSON object inside its own script element, kept apart from what visitors see.
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)
- The Core Web Vital that times how long the biggest image or text block in the opening view takes to finish drawing. Aim for 2.5 s or lower.
- llms.txt
- A suggested standard: a Markdown summary kept at the top level of a domain, pointing language models to the pages most worth reading.
- noindex
- A directive, set in a meta tag or a response header, asking search engines to keep a page out of results.
- Orphan page
- A page nothing else on the site links to. Only a sitemap entry or an outside link can lead anyone to it.
- Redirect chain
- Several redirects strung together before the visitor arrives. Every extra step costs time and can weaken the signals passed along.
- Rendering
- Running a page's scripts to produce what a browser finally shows. Anything that exists only after this step can escape crawlers that skip it.
- Rich results
- Search listings dressed up with extra details drawn from structured data, like star ratings, prices, or breadcrumb trails.
- robots.txt
- A plain text file at the top of a domain that tells bots which folders to stay out of. It governs fetching; keeping a page out of results takes noindex.
- Schema markup
- Structured data written in the Schema.org vocabulary to spell out the people, organizations, places, and products on a page.
- Search Console
- Google's free owner dashboard: clicks and impressions, index status, Core Web Vitals, and alerts about problems it detects.
- Soft 404
- A URL that answers with a success code yet shows an empty or not-found page. Google files it with the real 404s.
- Server-side rendering (SSR)
- Assembling the complete HTML on the server so a crawler gets every word in the first response, no scripts required.
- 301 redirect
- A permanent forwarding instruction from an old address to a new one, which passes nearly all of the old page's ranking signals along.
- XML sitemap
- A machine-readable list of the addresses a site wants crawled, often with the date each last changed.
These terms are used throughout the guides and services pages.