Resources — Glossary

SEO & GEO Glossary

Plain definitions of the SEO, GEO and AI-search terms used across this site — what each one means, and where it is covered in depth.

AI Mode: Google’s conversational search experience, where a question can be followed by further questions in the same session and the answer is assembled across several retrievals rather than one ranked list.
AI Overview: A generated summary shown above conventional results for some Google queries, assembled from pages the system retrieved and linked alongside the summary.
AI visibility: Whether a brand, product or page appears inside answers produced by AI systems — as a citation, a named entity, or a described option. It is observed by asking, not reported by a rank tracker.
Anchor text: The visible, clickable text of a link. Descriptive anchors tell both readers and crawlers what the destination page is about; generic anchors like “click here” tell them nothing.
Canonical URL: The URL a site declares as the preferred version of a page when the same or similar content is reachable at more than one address. Declared with a rel="canonical" link element.
Chunk: A passage-sized piece of a page. Retrieval systems commonly work with chunks rather than whole documents, which is why a self-contained section is easier to surface than an argument spread across a long page.
Content decay: The gradual loss of traffic or position on a page that once performed, usually because the information aged, competitors published something better, or the query itself changed meaning.
Core Web Vitals: Google’s named page-experience metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (loading), Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness) and Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability).
Crawl budget: The practical limit on how much of a site a crawler will fetch in a given period. It only becomes a real constraint on large sites, most often ones generating near-infinite URL combinations.
Entity: A distinct thing a search or answer system can recognise and reason about — a company, product, person, place or concept — as opposed to a string of characters that happens to match a query.
Faceted navigation: Filters on a category listing (size, colour, price) that generate URL combinations. Left unmanaged, they can produce vast numbers of near-duplicate indexable pages.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): The practice of making content retrievable, quotable and correctly attributable by systems that generate answers rather than list links. It overlaps heavily with SEO and does not replace it.
Grounding: Constraining a generated answer to sources retrieved at answer time, so statements can be traced back to a document rather than produced from model memory alone.
Index: The store of pages a search engine has crawled, processed and made eligible to be returned. A page can be crawled and still not indexed.
Internal linking: Links between pages on the same site. They distribute authority, express how topics relate to one another, and are the main way a crawler discovers pages that are not in the navigation.
Keyword cluster: A group of queries that share an intent closely enough that one page can satisfy all of them. Clusters, not individual keywords, are the unit a page should be built for.
llms.txt: A proposed plain-text file at a site’s root that summarises the site and lists its important pages for AI systems. Adoption is not universal and no system is required to read it.
NAP consistency: Name, address and phone number matching exactly everywhere a business is listed. Inconsistent details make it harder for any system to be confident two listings describe the same business.
Passage: A section of a page that can stand on its own. When answer systems quote a source, they typically quote a passage rather than summarising the whole document.
Pillar page: The comprehensive page for a topic, which links out to more specific pages covering each sub-question and receives links back from them.
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation): A pattern where a system retrieves documents relevant to a question and generates its answer from them. It is why being retrievable matters as much as being well-written.
Rich result: A search result rendered with extra features — an FAQ expander, a breadcrumb trail, a product panel — driven by structured data on the page.
Robots.txt: A file at a site’s root that tells compliant crawlers which paths they may request. It controls crawling, not indexing, and it is a request rather than an enforcement mechanism.
Schema markup: Structured data using the schema.org vocabulary, usually embedded as JSON-LD, that states in machine-readable form what a page is about.
Search intent: What someone is actually trying to do when they type a query — learn something, compare options, find a specific site, or buy. Matching intent matters more than matching wording.
SERP: Search engine results page. Increasingly a mixed surface of generated summaries, features and conventional links rather than ten blue links.
Topical authority: The depth and coherence of a site’s coverage of a subject. It is built by covering a topic completely and linking it together, not by publishing more pages about more things.
Zero-click search: A search that is resolved on the results page, so the user never visits a source. Visibility still occurred; the click did not.

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