SEO & AEO GLOSSARY

Optimizing content to appear in AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI assistants.

How well AI language models know and can accurately describe your brand, products, or content.

Bots like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot that index content for AI systems.

Google's AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of search results.

Another term for AEO - optimizing for generative AI search engines.

When AI assistants reference and link to your website as a source in their responses.

Searches where users get answers directly on the SERP without clicking to a website.

Strategies to get your content cited in Perplexity AI search results.

How well ChatGPT knows your brand and can recommend it to users.

OpenAI's web crawler that indexes content for ChatGPT and other OpenAI products.

Anthropic's web crawler that indexes content for Claude AI.

Search experiences powered by AI that provide direct answers instead of just links.

Natural language queries where users interact with AI assistants in dialogue format.

References to your brand across the web that AI systems use to assess authority.

Perplexity AI's web crawler that indexes content for their AI search engine.

How well Google's Gemini AI can find and reference your content.

Spoken queries processed by AI assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant.

Structuring content around entities (people, places, things) that AI can understand.

Database of entities and relationships that Google and AI systems use to understand content.

The practice of optimizing websites to rank higher in search engine results.

Optimization techniques applied directly on your website pages.

SEO activities done outside your website, like link building and brand mentions.

Links from other websites pointing to your site - a key ranking factor.

A score predicting how well a website will rank in search results.

HTML tags providing metadata about your page to search engines.

Highlighted answers that appear at the top of Google search results.

Finding and analyzing search terms people use to find content online.

The goal behind a user's search query - informational, navigational, commercial, or transactional.

The page displayed by search engines in response to a query.

Links that connect pages within the same website.

Longer, more specific keyword phrases with lower competition.

The clickable text in a hyperlink.

Strategy of acquiring backlinks from other websites to improve authority.

Special result types like featured snippets, local packs, and knowledge panels.

Backend optimization that helps search engines crawl and index your site.

Code markup that helps search engines understand your content better.

A specific vocabulary of structured data recognized by major search engines.

JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data - the preferred format for schema markup.

Google's metrics measuring user experience: LCP, INP, and CLS.

How easily search engine bots can access and navigate your website.

A file that tells search engines and AI crawlers which pages to access.

The preferred URL for a page when duplicate content exists.

A file listing all URLs on your site to help search engines discover content.

The process of adding web pages to a search engine's database.

How fast a web page loads for users.

Ensuring your website works well on mobile devices.

HTML attributes that tell search engines which language and region a page targets.

CSS and JavaScript that prevent a page from displaying until loaded.

Delaying the loading of images and content until they're needed.

Multiple redirects between the original URL and the final destination.

The number of pages search engines will crawl on your site within a timeframe.

Pages with no internal links pointing to them, making them hard to discover.

Identical or very similar content appearing on multiple URLs.

How your website's pages are organized and linked together.

Enhanced search results showing ratings, prices, or other structured data.

Visitors who find your website through unpaid search results.

The percentage of visitors who leave after viewing only one page.

Percentage of visitors who complete a desired action on your website.

Percentage of people who click your link after seeing it in search results.

Time a user spends on your page after clicking from search results.

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness - Google's quality guidelines.

Improving content to better match search intent and rank higher.

How recently content has been updated, a signal used by both search engines and AI.

Being recognized as an expert on a specific topic through comprehensive content coverage.

Finding topics competitors rank for that you haven't covered yet.