Glossary
Definitions
31 definitions
AEO (answer engine optimization)
AEO is an older name for the same goal as GEO: being the source an answer engine picks when it answers a question directly, from featured snippets to AI assistants.
AI Mode
AI Mode is Google's conversational search tab: the whole answer is generated, follow-up questions keep the thread, and a few sources are linked next to the text.
AI Overviews
AI Overviews are the AI-written summaries Google shows at the top of some search results, with links to the pages the summary was built from.
AI citation
An AI citation is a link an assistant places next to its answer to show where a statement comes from. It is the unit GEO work is measured in.
AI crawlers (GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot)
AI crawlers are the robots the assistant companies use to read websites, either to train models or to fetch sources for answers. Each has a name a site can allow or block in robots.txt.
Backlink
A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Engines read it as a vote of confidence from that site, weighted by its own authority and by how natural the link looks.
Brand mention
A brand mention is the name of a company written in a page or in an AI answer without necessarily a link. Engines use mentions to understand what a brand is and how it is regarded.
Canonical URL
The canonical URL is the address a site declares as the official one for a page when the same content is reachable at several addresses. Engines index that one and credit it with the links of the others.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are three measures of a page's experience as felt by real visitors: loading (LCP), responsiveness (INP) and visual stability (CLS). Google uses them as a small ranking signal and reports them in Search Console.
Crawling
Crawling is the way a search engine discovers and reads pages: a robot follows links and sitemaps, fetches each page, and hands its content to indexing. What the crawler cannot reach does not exist for the engine.
E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trust)
E-E-A-T is the grid Google's human quality raters use to judge whether a page and its author deserve trust: first-hand experience, expertise, authority in the field, and trustworthiness. It is a guideline, not a ranking score.
Entity
In search, an entity is a thing the engine recognises as one object (a company, a person, a place, a product) with properties and relations, independently of the words used to name it.
GEO (generative engine optimization)
GEO is the work of making a brand present in the answers written by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews, through citations with a link and mentions by name.
Google Business Profile
Google Business Profile is the free listing of a business on Google Search and Maps: address, hours, phone, photos, reviews. It is what the map results and the local pack are built from.
Google Search Console
Search Console is Google's free tool for site owners: it shows the queries a site appears on, its clicks and impressions, which pages are indexed and why others are not, and technical problems Google found.
RAG (retrieval-augmented generation)
RAG is the technique assistants use to answer with fresh facts: they first retrieve documents related to the question, then write the answer from those documents and cite them.
robots.txt
robots.txt is the text file at the root of a site that tells crawlers which parts they may fetch, robot by robot. Honest crawlers obey it; it is not a security measure.
SEO (search engine optimization)
SEO is the work of making a website appear higher in the unpaid results of search engines for the questions its clients type, through its technical health, its content and the links and mentions it earns.
SEO audit
An SEO audit is a one-off review of a website that lists what stops it from ranking (technical faults, weak or missing content, poor links) and ranks the fixes by impact. It is the usual starting point of SEO work.
SEO retainer
An SEO retainer is a monthly fee paid to an agency or consultant for ongoing work: technical follow-up, content, links and reporting. It is the most common way SEO is sold, next to one-off audits and projects.
SERP (search engine results page)
The SERP is the page a search engine shows after a query: unpaid results, ads, and features such as maps, images, snippets and AI summaries, in an order that changes with the question.
Search intent
Search intent is what a person wants when typing a query: to learn something, to find a specific site, to compare, or to buy. A page ranks when it serves the intent behind the words, not just the words.
Structured data (schema.org)
Structured data is a block of machine-readable facts added to a page, in the schema.org vocabulary, that tells engines what the page is about: a business, an article, a product, a question and its answer.