SEO Glossary
Explore our comprehensive SEO Glossary. Master essential SEO terms, definitions, and concepts from A to Z to understand SEO and digital marketing.
Google's AI-generated answer boxes that appear above traditional search results, summarizing answers with inline citations to source pages.
Being named in answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews—a measurable ranking and trust signal in generative search.
The inline links and attributions that answer engines add to the sources they use to write their answers. Earning them is the new goal of generative SEO.
Bots operated by LLM providers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot) to discover and index pages for training or retrieval.
The visits your site receives when users click a citation in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or another AI answer.
AI Content
Content written by—or substantially assisted by—a large language model. Google judges it on quality and helpfulness, not on production method.
The shift from single-query search to AI agents that plan, search, read, and act on your behalf across many tools and sources.
A discovery document in the Agent2Agent protocol that describes an agent's identity, endpoint, capabilities, skills, and authentication requirements.
A commerce protocol pattern for agent-assisted shopping, checkout, and merchant integrations.
Protocols and metadata that help AI agents discover products, authenticate users, pay, and complete transactions safely.
A machine-readable list of what a website or service can do for AI agents, from search and support to checkout and reporting.
The practice of making public APIs discoverable and understandable through OpenAPI, documentation, links, and metadata.
A protocol for agentic payments and user authorization, designed to make delegated purchases safer and more auditable.
Documentation and standardized OAuth metadata that explain authentication, authorization servers, protected resources, scopes, and consent boundaries for agents.
Alternative text that describes an image, used for accessibility and SEO purposes when images cannot be displayed.
A set of rules or instructions given to an AI system to help it learn how to perform its tasks, particularly important in search engine ranking systems.
The clickable text in a hyperlink that provides context about the destination page to both users and search engines.
glossary.terms.aeo
A link from one website to another, considered as a vote of confidence and used by search engines as a ranking factor.
The percentage of visitors who leave a website after viewing only one page, often indicating poor user experience or irrelevant content.
The search result page Google shows for your own brand name—a key trust and conversion surface you can actively shape.
OpenAI's search experience inside ChatGPT, blending live web results with the assistant's conversational answers.
A metric that measures how often a domain is cited in AI-generated answers for a defined topic set—the most direct measure of AEO success.
Anthropic's web crawler, used to keep Claude's knowledge current and to power citations in its answers.
Search that treats each query as part of an ongoing dialogue, with context carried across turns.
Google's user-experience metrics for the web—LCP, INP, and CLS—measuring loading, interactivity, and visual stability.
The process by which search engine bots systematically discover and scan web pages to understand their content and structure.
The ratio of users who click on a specific link to the total number of users who view a page, email, or advertisement.
An open-weights AI company whose models power a fast-growing search and chat product—notable in markets where cost or local-language performance matter.
An emerging shorthand for DNS-based AI discovery, usually through public DNS records that point agents to site metadata or discovery endpoints.
Earning brand mentions, authoritative links, and AI citations by getting your story into publications that matter.
Content that appears in multiple locations on the internet, which can confuse search engines about which version is most relevant.
A link that passes SEO value from the linking page to the destination page, as opposed to a nofollow link.
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness - four factors Google considers when evaluating content quality.
Dense numerical vectors that represent the meaning of text, images, or other data—the foundation of semantic search and RAG.
The practice of associating your brand, products, and content with disambiguated entities in Google's Knowledge Graph to win richer placements.
A hyperlink that points to a domain different from the one where the link appears, also known as an outbound link.
A metric measuring how actively involved your audience is with your content, including likes, shares, comments, and time spent.
A summary of an answer to a user query, displayed at the top of Google search results in a special box.
A web page created specifically to rank for specific search queries and funnel users to other pages, often considered a spam tactic.
The practice of delivering different content or advertisements to users based on their geographic location.
glossary.terms.geo
Google's algorithm update targeting content made for search engines rather than people, rewarding original, people-first content.
An HTML attribute that tells search engines which language a page is in and which language versions to show to users.
Three-digit codes returned by a server indicating the status of a web request, such as 200 for success or 404 for not found.
The process by which search engines store and organize web pages in their databases to make them available in search results.
The unique, additive value your content brings to a topic—Google explicitly rewards pages that contribute something the SERP does not already have.
A hyperlink that points to another page on the same website, helping with site navigation and SEO.
Internal Linking
The practice of linking from one page on your site to another—distributes authority, builds topical authority, and shapes how AI models navigate your content.
The process of optimizing images for web use to improve page load speed and search engine visibility.
The practice of optimizing JavaScript-heavy websites for search engines to ensure proper crawling and indexing.
Low-quality, spammy content that provides little value to users and can negatively impact search rankings.
A word or phrase that users enter into search engines, which websites optimize for to attract relevant traffic.
The percentage of times a keyword appears on a webpage compared to the total word count.
The practice of overloading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate search rankings, considered a black hat SEO tactic.
Google's structured database of entities and the relationships between them—powers knowledge panels, entity cards, and rich results.
The boxed information shown on the right of Google results for entities like brands, people, and places.
The process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own, which can improve search engine rankings.
HTTP Link headers that advertise machine-readable resources such as llms.txt, sitemaps, API catalogs, and policy files to AI agents.
When a language model produces confident but false information—a key consideration for how answer engines pick and trust sources.
LLM Optimization (LLMO)
The discipline of making your content easy for large language models to retrieve, understand, and cite—overlaps heavily with AEO and GEO.
llms.txt
A proposed file that gives LLM-driven crawlers a clean, machine-readable summary of your site—analogous to robots.txt for the AI era.
The practice of optimizing a website to rank better for local search results, particularly important for businesses with physical locations.
Longer, more specific keyword phrases that typically have lower search volume but higher conversion rates.
MCP (Model Context Protocol)
An open standard that lets AI agents connect to tools, data sources, and apps in a consistent, secure way.
A concise summary of what an MCP server offers, including tools, resources, authentication requirements, and safe usage boundaries.
An emerging agent commerce shorthand; use it carefully unless a specific official protocol source is identified.
A brief summary of a webpage's content that appears in search results below the title tag.
Google's practice of using the mobile version of a website for indexing and ranking in search results.
Search that lets users combine text, image, audio, and video in a single query—changing how content is discovered and ranked.
A link with a rel="nofollow" attribute that tells search engines not to pass SEO value to the destination page.
A branch of AI that helps computers understand, interpret, and generate human language, used by search engines for better query understanding.
Malicious practices aimed at harming a competitor's search rankings, such as building spammy links to their site.
Non-paid search results that appear naturally based on their relevance to the user's query.
The practice of optimizing individual web pages to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines.
SEO activities that take place outside of your website, such as link building and social media marketing.
How quickly a webpage loads and displays content, a crucial factor for both user experience and search engine rankings.
A Google feature that displays related questions users often ask about a particular search topic.
Dividing content across multiple pages, which can impact SEO if not implemented properly with proper linking.
Publishing content on high-authority third-party platforms to piggyback on their rankings—risky, but still widely used.
Google's ability to rank individual passages within a page, rather than only the page as a whole—changes the unit of optimization from page to paragraph.
A conversational answer engine that synthesizes answers from live web sources with inline citations—one of the main surfaces to optimize for in 2026.
Perplexity's web crawler, used to surface content in live answers rather than train models.
The SERP feature that appears above the first organic result—featured snippets, AI Overviews, PAA, and more.
The practice of crafting inputs that steer large language models toward accurate, useful, and safe outputs—a core SEO-adjacent skill.
A request for information entered by a user into a search engine, forming the basis for search results.
The AI-era technique of splitting a complex question into several sub-queries, answering each, then synthesizing a final answer.
A technique where AI search systems generate multiple concurrent, related queries to fetch additional relevant results and provide more comprehensive answers.
The process search engines use to interpret intent, entities, and context behind a query.
Google's rating of the quality and relevance of your ads, keywords, and landing pages, affecting ad rank and cost.
Search terms that are formatted as questions, often starting with who, what, where, when, why, or how.
A technique used by AI search systems to improve response quality by retrieving relevant web pages from a search index, then using that information to generate reliable answers with source links.
Any element that influences a website's position in search engine results pages, including content quality, backlinks, and technical SEO.
Enhanced search results that include additional information like ratings, images, or other structured data beyond basic listings.
Robots.txt
A file that tells search engine crawlers which pages or files they can or cannot request from a website.
The practice of using automation, including AI, to generate large volumes of content primarily to manipulate search rankings rather than to provide value to users, violating Google's spam policy.
A form of microdata that helps search engines understand and display content in rich snippets and knowledge graphs.
The practice of optimizing for every surface where people search—Google, YouTube, TikTok, Amazon, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and beyond.
Search Generative Experience (SGE)
Google's generative AI surface inside Search, providing synthesized answers with citations above traditional results.
The practice of optimizing for meaning, entities, and intent—not just target keywords. The foundation of modern, AI-era search visibility.
The page displayed by search engines in response to a user's query, containing organic and paid results.
Google's policy against hosting third-party content on authoritative domains purely to ride their rankings—also called parasite SEO.
Structured, authoritative content that AI engines repeatedly cite as the canonical reference for a topic.
A digital certificate that authenticates a website's identity and enables encrypted connections between browser and server.
Standardized markup that helps search engines and AI systems understand the meaning of your pages, not just their words.
An HTML element that specifies the title of a webpage, displayed in search results and browser tabs as the clickable headline.
The practice of optimizing a website's technical elements to improve search engine crawling and indexing.
Webpages with little or low-quality content that provide little value to users, which search engines typically penalize.
A pillar page supported by a group of interlinked articles on subtopics—the classic way to build topical authority.
The format and organization of a website's web addresses, which affects both user experience and search engine understanding.
A shorthand for commerce interoperability patterns that make products, checkout, and policies easier for agents to interpret.
The overall experience a user has when interacting with a website, including design, usability, and performance.
The underlying goal or purpose behind a user's search query, categorized as informational, navigational, transactional, or commercial.
Retrieving documents by similarity in a mathematical embedding space, not by exact keyword match—powers modern RAG and AI answer engines.
Technology that allows users to perform searches by speaking instead of typing, increasingly important with smart speakers and mobile devices.
Search technology that allows users to search using images instead of text queries, powered by AI and machine learning.
Search engines or tools focused on specific types of content, such as images, videos, news, or shopping results.
SEO techniques that follow search engine guidelines and focus on providing value to users rather than manipulating rankings.
An automated program that systematically browses the web to discover and index content for search engines.
Official guidelines and specifications for web technologies, ensuring websites work consistently across different browsers and devices.
A payment protocol that uses HTTP 402 Payment Required semantics for machine-to-machine and agent-driven payments.
A file that lists all important pages of a website to help search engines crawl and index them more efficiently.
An HTTP header used to control how search engine crawlers index and display a webpage, similar to meta robots tags.
Pages that could impact a person's future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety, requiring higher E-E-A-T standards.
A Russian search engine that uses its own algorithm and has unique ranking factors compared to Google.
A web search engine powered by Bing, providing search results and other services to Yahoo users.
A search query where the user finds the answer directly on the search results page without clicking through to any website.
A search engine results page that shows no organic results, often for queries where Google provides the answer directly.
