> Plain English definitions of SEO and AI search terms: AEO, GEO, canonical tags, crawl budget, entities, INP, IndexNow, llms.txt, soft 404s, and many more.
>
> Source: https://christopherabraham.com/guides/glossary/ · Updated 2026-10-06 · By Christopher Abraham

# Glossary of SEO and AI search terms

By [Christopher Abraham](https://christopherabraham.com/about/) · Published October 6, 2026

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.

**Faceted navigation**
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](https://christopherabraham.com/guides/) and [services](https://christopherabraham.com/services/) pages.

**[Christopher Abraham](https://christopherabraham.com/about/)** is an independent SEO consultant in Arlington, Virginia, Top Rated on Upwork with 100% Job Success, who writes from his own client work and checks every claim against primary sources. He has built websites since 1994 and practiced SEO since 1998. [How these pages are written](https://christopherabraham.com/about/editorial-policy/) · [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisabraham) · [Upwork](https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/chrisjabraham)