Glossary

47 search and AI terms, explained in one or two sentences.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T

AEO: Answer engine optimization: structuring content so it is chosen as the direct answer in snippets, “People also ask” and voice assistants.
AI crawler: A bot run by an AI company to collect pages for training or to answer questions live, such as GPTBot or PerplexityBot.
AI Overviews: Google’s AI-generated summaries shown above search results, with links to source pages.
Alt text: A text description of an image in the alt attribute, used by screen readers, search engines and AI models.
Anchor text: The clickable words of a link. Descriptive anchor text helps users and search engines understand the destination.
Backlink: A link from another website to yours. Links from relevant, trusted sites are a strong ranking signal.
Bing Webmaster Tools: Microsoft’s free console for monitoring a site in Bing, which also feeds Copilot and parts of ChatGPT search.
Canonical URL: The preferred version of a page, declared with rel="canonical", used to consolidate duplicates.
CLS: Cumulative Layout Shift: a Core Web Vital measuring unexpected layout movement. Good is below 0.1.
Core Web Vitals: Google’s three user-experience metrics: LCP, INP and CLS.
Crawl budget: How many pages a search engine is willing to crawl on a site in a given time.
DMARC: An email DNS record that tells receiving servers how to handle mail failing SPF or DKIM checks.
E-E-A-T: Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: the qualities Google uses to assess content credibility.
Entity: A distinct, identifiable thing such as a business, person or product that search engines and AI models track.
Featured snippet: An answer box at the top of Google results, quoted from a web page.
GEO: Generative engine optimization: making a site easy for AI assistants to access, understand, trust and cite.
Googlebot: Google’s main web crawler for search and AI Overviews.
GPTBot: OpenAI’s crawler for collecting model training data.
Hreflang: An attribute telling search engines which language or regional version of a page to show.
HSTS: HTTP Strict Transport Security: a header forcing browsers to always use HTTPS for a site.
Indexing: Adding a page to a search engine’s database so it can appear in results.
INP: Interaction to Next Paint: a Core Web Vital measuring responsiveness. Good is below 200 ms.
Internal link: A link from one page of a site to another page on the same site.
JSON-LD: A format for adding structured data to a page in a single script block. Recommended by Google.
Keyword density: How often a word or phrase appears relative to the total word count.
LCP: Largest Contentful Paint: a Core Web Vital measuring when the main content appears. Good is below 2.5 s.
llms.txt: A Markdown file at a site’s root summarising it for language models, with links to key pages.
Meta description: A short page summary in the HTML head, often shown under the title in search results.
Mixed content: Insecure http:// resources loaded on an https:// page, which browsers may block.
Nofollow: A link attribute asking search engines not to pass ranking credit through the link.
Noindex: A directive telling search engines not to include a page in results.
OAI-SearchBot: OpenAI’s crawler for ChatGPT search results.
Open Graph: Meta tags that control how links look when shared on social networks and messaging apps.
People Also Ask: Google’s expandable box of related questions and short answers.
PerplexityBot: The crawler that builds Perplexity’s answer engine index.
Redirect: Sending users and crawlers from one URL to another. 301 is permanent, 302 is temporary.
Rich results: Enhanced search listings such as stars, prices or FAQs, enabled by structured data.
robots.txt: A file at a site’s root telling crawlers which paths they may or may not crawl.
Schema markup: Structured data using the schema.org vocabulary to describe page content to machines.
SERP: Search engine results page.
Server-side rendering: Generating page HTML on the server, so content is visible without running JavaScript.
Sitemap: An XML file listing the URLs you want search engines to crawl and index.
SPF: An email DNS record listing which servers may send mail for a domain.
TBT: Total Blocking Time: a lab metric showing how long scripts block the page from responding.
Title tag: The HTML title of a page, shown as the headline in search results and browser tabs.
Topical authority: How thoroughly and credibly a site covers a subject across many related pages.
TTFB: Time to first byte: how long the server takes to start responding.

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