A
- AEOAnswer engine optimisation
- AEO is the work of making your content the direct answer to a question, originally in featured snippets and voice assistants, now in AI answers too.
- AI Mode
- AI Mode is Google's conversational search experience for questions that need exploration, reasoning or comparison.
- AI Overviews
- AI Overviews are AI-written summaries that Google shows at the top of some search results, with links to supporting pages.
- AI search
- AI search is when people ask an AI assistant a question and get one written answer, often naming specific businesses, instead of a list of links.
B
- Brand mention
- A brand mention is any reference to a business by name on another website, video, forum or review platform, linked or not.
C
- ChatGPT ads
- ChatGPT ads are sponsored placements shown separately from ChatGPT's answers to users on the Free and Go plans.
- Citation
- A citation is a link or reference to a source page inside an AI-generated answer.
- Commodity content
- Commodity content is generic content based on common knowledge that anyone could write and that adds little unique insight.
E
- E-E-A-TExperience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness
- E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: the qualities Google says its systems aim to reward in content.
- Entity
- An entity is a distinct, identifiable thing, such as a business, person, place or product, that search engines and AI systems can recognise and describe.
- Entity relationships
- Entity relationships are the connections between entities, such as who founded a business, where it operates and what it offers.
F
- Featured snippet
- A featured snippet is a short extract from one page that Google shows above the normal results to answer a question directly.
G
- Generative engine
- A generative engine is a search system that uses a language model to write an answer from multiple sources, rather than only listing links.
- GEOGenerative engine optimisation
- GEO is the work of getting a business or its content named and cited inside answers written by AI systems.
- Google Business Profile
- Google Business Profile is Google's free listing for businesses, showing details like address, hours, category and reviews.
- GPTBot
- GPTBot is OpenAI's crawler for collecting content that may be used to train its AI models.
- GroundingRetrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
- Grounding is when an AI system fetches up-to-date pages and bases its answer on them, rather than relying only on what it learned in training.
H
- Helpful, people-first content
- People-first content is created mainly to help readers, not to manipulate search rankings.
I
- Information gain
- Information gain is how much new information a page adds beyond what's already published on the topic.
K
- Knowledge Graph
- The Knowledge Graph is Google's database of entities and the facts and relationships between them.
- Knowledge panel
- A knowledge panel is the information box Google shows about an entity, such as a business or person, drawn from its Knowledge Graph.
L
- llms.txt
- llms.txt is a proposed file that gives AI tools a short, plain-text summary of a website and links to its key pages.
M
- Machine Trust
- Machine Trust is the degree to which AI systems can identify a business correctly, verify its claims, understand what it is known for, and confidently include it in an answer or recommendation.
N
- nosnippet
- nosnippet is a robots meta rule that tells Google not to show a text snippet from a page, which also keeps that content out of AI Overviews and AI Mode.
O
- OAI-SearchBot
- OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's crawler for ChatGPT search. Sites that block it won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers.
Q
- Query fan-out
- Query fan-out is when an AI search system runs several related searches at once to build a fuller answer.
R
- Rich results
- Rich results are enhanced search listings, such as review stars or event dates, that Google can show when a page has valid structured data.
- robots.txt
- robots.txt is a file at the root of a website that tells crawlers which parts of the site they may visit.
S
- Scaled content abuse
- Scaled content abuse is Google's spam policy against mass-producing pages, by any method including AI, mainly to manipulate rankings.
- Schema.org
- Schema.org is the shared vocabulary that Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex use for structured data.
- Search generative AI control
- The Search generative AI control is a Search Console setting that lets a site choose whether its content appears in Google's AI Overviews, AI Mode and AI features in Discover.
- SEOSearch engine optimisation
- SEO is the work of helping search engines find, understand and rank your pages.
- Structured dataSchema markup
- Structured data is code on a page that labels facts, such as a business name, address or article author, in a standard format search engines can read.
T
- Training data
- Training data is the text an AI model learned from before release. It shapes what the model 'knows' about a business without searching.
Z
- Zero-click search
- A zero-click search is one where the person gets their answer on the results page and doesn't click through to any website.