The words of search and AI, in plain English

Short, sourced definitions of the terms you'll meet when you work on Google rankings and AI answers. Each links to the official documentation behind it.

AEO (answer engine optimisation): Writing and structuring pages so a search engine or voice assistant uses them as the direct answer to a question.
AI Mode: Google Search's conversational mode, where people ask follow-up questions and get AI-written answers with links to sources.
AI Overviews: Google's AI-written summaries at the top of some search results, with links to the pages they draw on.
Backlinks: Links from other websites to yours, which search engines use as one signal of a page's importance and trust.
Canonical URL: The one address you want search engines to treat as the main version of a page when several addresses show the same content.
Crawl budget: How many pages a search engine is able and willing to crawl on a site in a given time.
E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust: the qualities Google's quality raters look for in content and its creators.
Featured snippet: A short answer Google shows above or within the results, taken from one page and credited with a link.
GEO (generative engine optimisation): The work of making a business easy for AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity to read, trust, name and cite in their answers.
Google Business Profile: A free Google listing for a business that appears in Maps and local results, with hours, photos, reviews and contact details.
Google Search Console: Google's free tool that shows how a site performs in Google Search: searches, clicks, positions and indexing problems.
Indexing: A search engine storing and understanding a page so it can appear in results.
llms.txt: A proposed markdown file at a site's root that summarises the site and links to its key pages for AI tools.
LocalBusiness schema: Structured data that describes a local business: its name, address, phone, opening hours, location and links.
NAP (name, address, phone): A business's name, address and phone number: details that should be identical everywhere the business is listed.
People Also Ask: Google's expandable box of related questions, each with a short answer from a web page.
robots.txt: A text file at a site's root that tells crawlers which parts of the site they may or may not crawl.
Schema markup (structured data): Code added to a page, usually JSON-LD, that describes its content in the schema.org vocabulary so search engines understand it.
Sitemap (sitemap.xml): A file that lists a site's pages so search engines can find them, often with the date each page last changed.
Zero-click search: A search that ends without a click to any website, because the answer was shown on the results page itself.

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The words of search and AI, in plain English

Short, sourced definitions of the terms you'll meet when you work on Google rankings and AI answers. Each links to the official documentation behind it.

AEO (answer engine optimisation): Writing and structuring pages so a search engine or voice assistant uses them as the direct answer to a question.
AI Mode: Google Search's conversational mode, where people ask follow-up questions and get AI-written answers with links to sources.
AI Overviews: Google's AI-written summaries at the top of some search results, with links to the pages they draw on.
Backlinks: Links from other websites to yours, which search engines use as one signal of a page's importance and trust.
Canonical URL: The one address you want search engines to treat as the main version of a page when several addresses show the same content.
Crawl budget: How many pages a search engine is able and willing to crawl on a site in a given time.
E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust: the qualities Google's quality raters look for in content and its creators.
Featured snippet: A short answer Google shows above or within the results, taken from one page and credited with a link.
GEO (generative engine optimisation): The work of making a business easy for AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity to read, trust, name and cite in their answers.
Google Business Profile: A free Google listing for a business that appears in Maps and local results, with hours, photos, reviews and contact details.
Google Search Console: Google's free tool that shows how a site performs in Google Search: searches, clicks, positions and indexing problems.
Indexing: A search engine storing and understanding a page so it can appear in results.
llms.txt: A proposed markdown file at a site's root that summarises the site and links to its key pages for AI tools.
LocalBusiness schema: Structured data that describes a local business: its name, address, phone, opening hours, location and links.
NAP (name, address, phone): A business's name, address and phone number: details that should be identical everywhere the business is listed.
People Also Ask: Google's expandable box of related questions, each with a short answer from a web page.
robots.txt: A text file at a site's root that tells crawlers which parts of the site they may or may not crawl.
Schema markup (structured data): Code added to a page, usually JSON-LD, that describes its content in the schema.org vocabulary so search engines understand it.
Sitemap (sitemap.xml): A file that lists a site's pages so search engines can find them, often with the date each page last changed.
Zero-click search: A search that ends without a click to any website, because the answer was shown on the results page itself.

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