The AI search glossary
Every term you need for SEO, GEO and AI visibility — defined in one sentence, then explained for teams that have to act on it. Sourced, dated, and written to be quoted.
Start here
New to AI search? Read these six, in order.
- 01Search engine optimizationThe index every AI engine retrieves from
- 02Generative engine optimizationEarning a place inside the answer
- 03Retrieval-augmented generationHow engines fetch sources before writing
- 04Query fan-outWhy one question becomes many searches
- 05AI citationWhat winning looks like
- 06AI share of voiceHow to measure it against competitors
Technical SEO · Rendering, indexing and markup: whether engines can read the page at all.
C
- Technical SEOCanonical tagAn HTML link element (rel="canonical") that tells search engines which URL is the preferred version of a page reachable at several addresses, consolidating its ranking signals onto that one URL — a strong hint, not a command.
- CWVTechnical SEOCore Web VitalsGoogle’s three field metrics for page experience — Largest Contentful Paint for loading, Interaction to Next Paint for responsiveness and Cumulative Layout Shift for visual stability — measured from real Chrome users and used as a modest ranking signal.
- Technical SEOCrawl budgetThe number of URLs a search engine is willing and able to crawl on a site in a given period, set by how much load the server can take and how much the engine wants the content — a real constraint mainly for large or fast-changing sites.
I
- Technical SEOIndexingThe step in which a search engine processes a crawled page and stores it in its searchable database; only indexed pages can rank, or be retrieved for AI answers built on that index, and being crawled does not guarantee being indexed.
- Technical SEOIndexNowAn open protocol that lets a website notify participating search engines, led by Microsoft Bing, the moment a URL is added, updated or deleted, instead of waiting to be recrawled — Google does not use it.
S
- Technical SEOSchema markupStructured data, usually written as JSON-LD with the Schema.org vocabulary, that labels what a page contains — an article, a product, an organization, a local business — so search engines can interpret it unambiguously and show it as rich results.
- SSRTechnical SEOServer-side renderingThe practice of generating a page’s full HTML on the server before sending it, so crawlers that don’t run JavaScript — which includes most AI crawlers — can read the content in the first response.
- Technical SEOSnippet controlsRobots directives and HTML attributes — nosnippet, max-snippet and data-nosnippet — that limit how much of a page search engines may quote in results, and in Google they also limit what AI Overviews and AI Mode can use.
X
Start here
New to AI search? Read these six, in order.
- 01Search engine optimizationThe index every AI engine retrieves from
- 02Generative engine optimizationEarning a place inside the answer
- 03Retrieval-augmented generationHow engines fetch sources before writing
- 04Query fan-outWhy one question becomes many searches
- 05AI citationWhat winning looks like
- 06AI share of voiceHow to measure it against competitors
Browse by topic
Seven areas, from how answer engines work to how you measure them.
AI search & GEO
The disciplines and the surfaces: SEO, GEO, AEO, and where AI answers appear.
How LLMs answer
How language models retrieve, rank and ground the sources they cite.
AI crawlers
The bots that read your site, what each one does, and how to control them.
Technical SEO
Rendering, indexing and markup: whether engines can read the page at all.
Content & relevance
What makes a page the best answer to a question, and keeps it that way.
Authority & off-site
Links, mentions and entities: why engines trust one source over another.
Measurement
How to see whether search and AI engines rank, cite and send you traffic.
Questions about the vocabulary
What's the difference between SEO, GEO and AEO?
SEO earns rankings in search results, AEO formats content so it can be used as a direct answer, and GEO earns citations inside AI-generated answers. All three rest on the same foundation — crawlable, indexed, genuinely useful pages — so they’re layers of one job, not three competing strategies.
What does LLM SEO mean?
LLM SEO is making a brand visible in what large language models say — both from their training data and from the pages they cite when they search the web. It’s the model-centric name for the same work GEO describes.
Which AI crawlers should I allow?
Allow each engine’s search and user-triggered bots — OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User, PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User — and decide on training crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended separately. Blocking a training crawler doesn’t remove you from that engine’s search.
How is this glossary kept accurate?
Every entry is dated and cites its sources, and the original frameworks are labelled as ours. Entries on fast-moving topics — crawlers, engine behavior, analytics — are re-checked every quarter, and an entry’s updated date changes only when its facts are re-verified.
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