Search terms, in plain words.

All terms

AEOAI search

Answer engine optimization: making content easy for search features and AI assistants to use as a direct answer.

AI OverviewsAI search

Google’s AI-generated summaries shown in search results, with links to the sources they draw on.

Answer stabilityAI search

How often the same prompt returns the same brands across repeated runs.

BacklinkLinks

A link from another site to yours. Search engines use links to discover pages and judge them.

Canonical URLTechnical

The version of a page you ask search engines to treat as the main one when several URLs show similar content.

CitationAI search

In AI answers, a link or named source the assistant shows to support what it says.

Citation rateMeasurement

The share of AI answers that link to a brand’s own site.

Core Web VitalsTechnical

Google’s measures of loading, responsiveness and visual stability, based on real-user data.

Crawl budgetTechnical

How many URLs a search engine is able and willing to crawl on a site in a given period.

DisavowLinks

A file asking Google to ignore specific links when assessing a site. Used rarely, with evidence.

E-E-A-TContent

Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust — qualities Google’s quality rater guidelines ask raters to assess.

EntityAI search

A distinct thing — a brand, person, product or place — that search engines and AI systems recognise and connect to facts.

GEOAI search

Generative engine optimization: work aimed at being mentioned and cited in answers written by AI systems.

HreflangTechnical

Markup that tells search engines which language or regional version of a page to show to which users.

IndexationTechnical

Whether a page is stored in a search engine’s index, and so eligible to appear in results.

Internal linkContent

A link between two pages on the same site. Internal links help people and crawlers find and weigh pages.

NoindexTechnical

An instruction that keeps a page out of a search engine’s index.

Prompt setMeasurement

The fixed list of questions used to measure visibility in AI answers over time.

RenderingTechnical

Running a page’s code to produce the HTML a search engine actually sees.

Robots.txtTechnical

A file that tells crawlers which parts of a site they may request.

Search intentContent

What a person is trying to get done with a query: learn, compare, buy or find a place.

Share of AnswerMeasurement

The share of AI answers for a set of prompts that name a brand at all.

Share of voiceMeasurement

In AI search, the share of tracked prompts where an assistant mentions or cites your brand rather than competitors.

Structured dataTechnical

Code that describes a page’s content in a standard vocabulary, such as schema.org.

XML sitemapTechnical

A file listing the URLs you want search engines to know about.