The SEO and AI search glossary.

An AI crawler is a bot that reads your site for an AI product, such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, or PerplexityBot.

AI Overviews are the AI-generated answers Google shows above the classic results.

AEO is optimising to be the answer an engine extracts, in featured snippets, People Also Ask, and voice results.

A canonical tag tells search engines which URL is the main version of a page when several URLs show the same content.

Core Web Vitals are Google's measures of loading, interactivity, and visual stability.

Crawlability is how easily a search engine can reach and read the pages of your site.

Duplicate content is the same or near-identical content available at more than one URL.

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust.

Entity SEO is optimising for the things a search engine understands, people, places, brands, concepts, rather than for keyword strings.

A featured snippet is the boxed answer Google shows at the top of some results, pulled directly from a page.

GEO is optimising to be cited by generative AI answers, in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.

Indexation is whether a search engine has stored your page and is willing to show it.

Internal linking is how your pages link to each other.

llms.txt is a file at the root of your site that gives AI assistants a curated map of your most important pages.

noindex is an instruction that tells a search engine not to store a page.

An orphan page is a page that no other page on your site links to.

A redirect chain is when one URL redirects to another, which redirects again, before reaching the final page.

A render-blocking resource is a script or stylesheet that must load before the browser can show the page.

robots.txt is a file at the root of your site that tells crawlers where they may and may not go.

Semantic SEO is building coverage around a topic and its meaning rather than around exact keywords.

Structured data is markup that tells search engines what an entity on a page is, not just what words appear.

Thin content is a page with little unique value.

Topical authority is how thoroughly and credibly your site covers a subject.

An XML sitemap is a list of the URLs you want a search engine to index.