SEO, AEO & GEO glossary
Plain-English definitions of common search terms.
Last updated
- Anchor text
- The clickable words of a link. Natural, descriptive anchor text helps readers and search engines understand what the linked page is about.
- Answer engine optimization (AEO)
- Structuring content so search features and assistants can pull a direct answer from it: concise answers, clear headings, FAQs and accurate structured data.
- Backlink
- A link from another website to yours. Relevant links from credible sites are one signal search engines use to judge trust.
- Canonical URL
- The preferred address of a page when the same or similar content is reachable at more than one URL.
- Conversion rate
- The share of visitors who complete a desired action, such as sending a contact form.
- Core Web Vitals
- Google's set of page experience metrics measuring loading, interactivity and visual stability.
- Crawling
- The process of search engine bots discovering pages by following links and reading sitemaps.
- E-E-A-T
- Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness: the qualities Google's quality guidelines ask human raters to look for. It describes what good content shows, and is not a single ranking score.
- Featured snippet
- A highlighted answer shown at the top of some search results, taken from a web page.
- Generative engine optimization (GEO)
- Making a brand and its content easy for AI assistants and generative search to find, understand and cite, through clear entity information, named authors, sources and well-structured pages.
- Google Search Console
- A free Google tool that shows how a site performs in Google Search and reports crawling and indexing issues.
- Indexing
- The step where a search engine stores and organizes a crawled page so it can appear in results.
- Internal link
- A link from one page of a site to another page of the same site.
- Keyword
- A word or phrase people type into a search engine. In SEO, keywords are used to understand what searchers want and which pages should serve them.
- llms.txt
- A proposed plain-text file at a site's root that summarizes the site and links to key pages for language models. Support among AI systems varies.
- Local SEO
- Optimization aimed at searches with local intent, such as a service plus a city or "near me".
- Meta description
- A short summary of a page placed in its HTML. Search engines may use it as the snippet shown under the title.
- On-page SEO
- Optimization of what is on a page: title, headings, copy, internal links, images and structured data.
- Organic traffic
- Visitors who arrive from unpaid search results rather than ads.
- PPC (pay-per-click)
- Advertising where you pay each time someone clicks your ad. Results are immediate but stop when the budget stops.
- rel="nofollow", rel="sponsored" and rel="ugc"
- Link attributes that tell search engines how to treat a link. Google recommends "sponsored" for paid links and "ugc" for user-generated links.
- robots.txt
- A file at the root of a site that tells crawlers which areas they may or may not crawl.
- Schema markup
- Code, usually JSON-LD, that labels the meaning of page content (for example an organization, a service or an FAQ) so search engines can interpret it accurately.
- Search intent
- The goal behind a search, usually informational (learn), navigational (find a site), commercial (compare) or transactional (buy).
- SEO (search engine optimization)
- The practice of improving a website so search engines can understand it and people choose it when they search for what it offers.
- SERP
- Search engine results page: the page of results a search engine shows after a query, including ads, organic results and features such as answer boxes.
- Technical SEO
- Work that helps search engines crawl, render and index a site, such as site structure, speed, redirects and canonical tags.
- Title tag
- The HTML title of a page, shown in browser tabs and often as the headline of a search result.
- Topic cluster
- A group of related pages organized around one subject, with a main page linking to supporting pages and back.
- XML sitemap
- A file that lists a site's important URLs to help search engines discover them.
Ready to see where your search visibility stands?
Tell us about your business. We will review your current visibility and recommend the right next step.