Glossary
SEO and AI search terms, in plain language
Each term starts with a short definition, then adds context and an example.
- AI citation
- A source an AI assistant links to or names when it gives an answer.
- Anchor text
- The clickable words of a link.
- Answer engine optimization (AEO)
- The practice of making a business easy for AI assistants to find, understand, name and cite in their answers.
- Backlink
- A link from another website to yours.
- Brand SERP
- The search results page you see when you search for a business by name.
- Canonical URL
- The address a site declares as the main version of a page when several addresses show similar content.
- Core Web Vitals
- Measurements of how quickly a page loads, responds and stays stable, based on real visits.
- Crawl budget
- The number of pages a search engine is willing to fetch from your site in a given period.
- Disavow
- A file you give a search engine asking it to ignore certain links to your site.
- E-E-A-T
- Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: the qualities search quality guidelines look for in content and its source.
- Entity
- A clearly identifiable thing, such as a business, that search engines and AI assistants can recognise and tell apart from others.
- Indexation
- Whether a search engine has stored a page so it can appear in results.
- JSON-LD
- A format for adding structured data to a page so machines can read what it is about.
- Knowledge panel
- A box in search results that summarises a business, person or topic, drawn from sources the search engine trusts.
- llms.txt
- A proposed plain-text file at the root of a site that summarises its content for language models.
- Noindex
- An instruction that asks search engines not to include a page in their index.
- Private blog network (PBN)
- A group of websites built to pass links to other sites and so inflate their rankings.
- robots.txt
- A file at the root of a site telling crawlers which areas they may or may not fetch.
- Share of voice
- The share of relevant answers or results in which your business appears compared with competitors.
- XML sitemap
- A file that lists the pages a site wants search engines to find.
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