Glossary

SEO, AEO & GEO glossary

Plain-language definitions for every term in modern search — the kind AI engines like to cite.

AllGEOAEOAI SearchTechnical SEOContent Automation
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A

Technical SEO

Alt Text

Alt text is the alt attribute added to an image in HTML that describes the image in words, supporting screen-reader accessibility and helping search engines and AI understand what the image depicts.

C

Technical SEO

Canonical Tag

A canonical tag is the rel="canonical" link element placed in a page's HTML that tells search engines which URL is the preferred, authoritative version among duplicate or near-duplicate pages so ranking signals consolidate there.

Technical SEO

Canonicalization

Canonicalization is the process of choosing and signaling the single preferred URL among duplicate or near-duplicate pages so search engines consolidate ranking signals onto one authoritative version instead of splitting them.

Technical SEO

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are a set of user-experience metrics — Largest Contentful Paint (loading), Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness), and Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability) — used to gauge how a page performs for real users.

Technical SEO

Crawl Budget

Crawl budget is the amount of crawling a search engine will do on a site in a given timeframe, shaped by how much the server can handle (crawl capacity) and how much the engine wants to crawl (crawl demand).

H

Technical SEO

Hreflang

Hreflang is an HTML link attribute (rel="alternate" hreflang) that tells search engines the language and optional regional targeting of a page, helping them serve the correct localized version to the right audience.

I

Technical SEO

Index Coverage

Index coverage describes which of a site's pages a search engine has crawled and included in its index, where they become eligible to appear in results; pages excluded from the index cannot rank or be cited.

L

Technical SEO

llms.txt

llms.txt is a proposed standard—a Markdown file placed at a website's root (/llms.txt) that gives large language models a curated, clean map of the site's most important content, helping them find and use that information accurately at inference time.

M

Technical SEO

Meta Description

The meta description is an HTML meta tag that summarizes a page's content; search engines often use it as the snippet beneath a result, where it influences click-through even though it is not a direct ranking factor.

Technical SEO

Meta Title

The meta title, or title tag, is the HTML element that defines a page's title, shown in browser tabs and often used as the clickable headline in search results, influencing relevance signals and click-through.

N

Technical SEO

Nofollow vs Dofollow Links

Dofollow links are ordinary links that can pass ranking signals, while nofollow links carry a rel="nofollow" attribute telling search engines not to pass those signals; since 2019 Google treats nofollow as a hint rather than a strict directive.

R

Technical SEO

robots.txt

robots.txt is a text file at a site's root, part of the Robots Exclusion Protocol, that tells web crawlers which URLs they may or may not request, guiding crawl behavior without guaranteeing pages stay out of the index.

S

Technical SEO

Schema Markup

Schema markup is structured data built on the Schema.org vocabulary, usually written in JSON-LD, that labels page elements like products, articles, and FAQs so search engines and AI can understand and present them as rich results.

Technical SEO

Sitemap XML

A sitemap XML is a structured file, following the sitemaps.org protocol, that lists the URLs on a website so search engines and AI crawlers can discover, prioritize, and index content more efficiently.

Technical SEO

Structured Data

Structured data is machine-readable markup, commonly using Schema.org vocabulary in JSON-LD, that describes a page's content to search engines and AI so they can understand entities, relationships, and context and power rich results.