AI Search Glossary
65 concepts that do most of the work in AI search conversations — each defined plainly, with an interactive explainer you can actually click. Where the industry uses a term loosely, we say so rather than inventing a settled definition.
AEOAI CitationAI OverviewsAI SEOAnswer-First ContentAttributionBranded Search LiftCanonicalizationCitation ShareClaudeBotClient-Side RenderingContent CannibalizationContext WindowCore Web VitalsCorroborationCrawl BudgetDark TrafficE-E-A-TEntityEntity DisambiguationFAQPage SchemaFeatured SnippetFreshnessGEOGoogle-ExtendedGPTBotGroundingHallucinationIndex BloatJavaScript SEOJSON-LDKnowledge GraphKnowledge PanelLLM SEOllms.txtLog File AnalysisModel MemoryOrganization SchemaPassage ExtractionPeople Also AskPerplexityBotProduct SchemaProgrammatic SEOPrompt SetQuery Fan-OutRAGRender ParityRich Resultsrobots.txtsameAsSchema MarkupSearch IntentSemantic SEOServer-Side RenderingShare of VoiceSource SelectionThin ContentTopic ClusterTopical AuthorityTopical MapTraining DataVector EmbeddingXML SitemapYMYLZero-Click Search
Core AI search 9
GEOGEO is optimizing so generative AI systems name your brand as a source when they compose an answer — competing…AEOAEO is structuring content so an AI system can lift a clean, correct, self-contained answer straight out of yo…LLM SEOLLM SEO is optimizing a brand for how language models find and attribute information, across two separate path…AI SEOAI SEO is optimizing a brand to be found, understood, and cited by AI systems that generate answers, rather th…AI OverviewsAI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that appear above organic results in Google Search, answering the quer…Zero-Click SearchA zero-click search is one where the user gets their answer inside the search or chat interface and never visi…Citation ShareCitation share is the proportion of a fixed, benchmarked prompt set where your brand is named in the generated…Prompt SetA prompt set is a fixed list of questions used to measure AI visibility consistently — the benchmark everythin…AI CitationAn AI citation is when a generated answer names your brand or links your page as a source it drew on.…
Crawling & rendering 16
Crawl BudgetCrawl budget is the number of URLs a crawler will fetch from your site in a given period — set by what your se…Render ParityRender parity is whether the content a crawler receives matches what a human's browser displays — and on moder…Server-Side RenderingServer-side rendering means the server builds complete HTML before sending it, so any crawler receives your fu…Client-Side RenderingClient-side rendering means the server sends a near-empty shell and JavaScript builds the page in the browser …JavaScript SEOJavaScript SEO is the practice of making sites that depend on JavaScript readable by crawlers, most of which a…robots.txtrobots.txt is a plain text file at your domain root telling crawlers which paths they may fetch — including th…GPTBotGPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler, controllable through robots.txt, and documented as being used to gather traini…ClaudeBotClaudeBot is Anthropic's web crawler, controllable via robots.txt, with Claude-User handling fetches triggered…PerplexityBotPerplexityBot is Perplexity's web crawler. Because Perplexity retrieves live on nearly every query, blocking i…Google-ExtendedGoogle-Extended is a robots.txt directive controlling whether your content is eligible for Gemini grounding an…llms.txtllms.txt is a proposed convention: a markdown file at your domain root summarising your site's key content for…XML SitemapAn XML sitemap is a file listing the URLs you want crawlers to know about, usually with a last-modified date f…CanonicalizationCanonicalization is declaring which URL is the definitive version of a page when several URLs serve similar or…Index BloatIndex bloat is having large numbers of low-value, thin or near-duplicate pages in the index, diluting site qua…Core Web VitalsCore Web Vitals are Google's user-experience metrics: Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and…Log File AnalysisLog file analysis is examining your server's request logs to see exactly which crawlers fetched which URLs, wh…
Entities & semantics 10
EntityAn entity is a distinct thing a system can identify and attach attributes to — a company, product, person or c…Knowledge GraphA knowledge graph is a structured database of entities and the relationships between them, used to answer ques…sameAssameAs is a schema.org property that links your entity to its verified profiles elsewhere, telling systems the…Entity DisambiguationEntity disambiguation is the work of separating your brand from other things sharing its name, so systems attr…Semantic SEOSemantic SEO is optimizing for meaning and relationships between concepts rather than for keyword matching.…Topical AuthorityTopical authority is being treated as a credible source on a subject — earned through complete, well-structure…Topical MapA topical map is a defined structure of your subject domain — every concept within it, how they relate, and wh…Topic ClusterA topic cluster is a pillar page covering a broad topic plus supporting pages covering its sub-topics, all int…Vector EmbeddingA vector embedding represents a piece of text as a list of numbers that captures its meaning, so systems can c…Knowledge PanelA knowledge panel is the information box Google shows for a recognised entity, drawn from its Knowledge Graph.…
Structured data 6
Schema MarkupSchema markup is structured data added to a page that states facts about it — price, author, organisation, ava…JSON-LDJSON-LD is the recommended format for structured data: a block of JSON in a script tag describing what a page …Organization SchemaOrganization schema is structured data declaring your company's identity — name, description, logo, contact de…Product SchemaProduct schema is structured data declaring a product's facts — name, brand, price, availability, condition, i…FAQPage SchemaFAQPage schema is structured data declaring that a page contains genuine question-and-answer pairs, making the…Rich ResultsRich results are enhanced search listings — star ratings, prices, FAQs, recipes, events — generated from struc…
Content & structure 12
Answer-First ContentAnswer-first content states the answer in the opening sentence of each section, then provides context and supp…Passage ExtractionPassage extraction is when a retrieval system selects a specific chunk of your page rather than the whole docu…Featured SnippetA featured snippet is the answer box Google displays above organic results, quoting a passage from a page it c…People Also AskPeople Also Ask is Google's expandable box of related questions, each revealing a short extracted answer from …Query Fan-OutQuery fan-out is when a system decomposes a single question into multiple sub-queries, retrieves for each, and…Search IntentSearch intent is what the person actually wants from a query — information, a specific site, a comparison, or …Content CannibalizationContent cannibalization is when several pages on your own site target the same intent, splitting signals so no…Thin ContentThin content is a page offering little value relative to what already exists on the topic — a judgement about …Programmatic SEOProgrammatic SEO is generating pages at scale from a dataset and a template — one page per row — which works b…FreshnessFreshness is how recently content was genuinely updated — and how clearly that update is signalled to crawlers…E-E-A-TE-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust — Google's framework for assessing wheth…YMYLYMYL — Your Money or Your Life — covers topics that could materially affect someone's health, financial stabil…
How models work 8
RAGRAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) is when a system searches for relevant documents, feeds them to a languag…GroundingGrounding is constraining a model's answer to retrieved source material rather than letting it generate from m…Model MemoryModel memory is what a language model carries from its training data — the impression it has of your brand whe…HallucinationA hallucination is when a language model states something false or fabricated with the same confidence it stat…Source SelectionSource selection is how an AI system decides which of the documents it retrieved actually get cited in the ans…CorroborationCorroboration is multiple independent, credible sources stating the same fact — which is what converts a claim…Training DataTraining data is the body of text a model learned from — and it determines what the model knows about your bra…Context WindowA context window is the maximum amount of text a model can hold in view at once — the prompt, retrieved docume…
Measurement 4
AttributionAttribution is assigning credit for a conversion to the marketing touchpoints that influenced it — a model tha…Branded Search LiftBranded search lift is an increase in searches for your brand name, which frequently indicates discovery happe…Dark TrafficDark traffic is visits that arrive with no identifiable referrer and get bucketed as direct, even though they …Share of VoiceShare of voice is your visibility as a proportion of the total available in a category — in AI search, the sha…
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- A sample of category prompts and who gets cited
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