SEO, GEO & AEO Glossary

The terms that define how brands appear on Google and in AI answer engines — explained in plain language, no fluff. Every definition stands on its own: you can quote it as is.

Fundamentals

SEO (Search Engine Optimization): SEO is the discipline of optimizing a website to appear in the top organic results of search engines like Google. It combines technical factors (crawling, indexing, speed), content factors (relevance, search intent) and authority factors (links, mentions) to earn visibility without paying for ads.
SERP (Search Engine Results Page): The SERP is the results page a search engine shows after a query. Today it includes much more than blue links: AI Overviews, featured snippets, local map packs, images, videos and related questions. Each format has its own optimization requirements.
CTR (Click-Through Rate): CTR is the percentage of people who click your result after seeing it: clicks divided by impressions. A low CTR in good positions usually means the title and description fail to communicate value — or that a SERP module (like an AI Overview) answers before the user reaches your link.
Featured snippet: A featured snippet is the direct answer Google displays in a box above organic results, extracted from a web page. You earn it by answering the question directly and concisely (40–60 words) immediately after a heading that matches the query.
E-E-A-T: E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. It's the framework Google's quality raters use to judge content. It isn't a direct ranking factor, but its signals — verifiable authorship, cited sources, reputation — do influence Google's systems.
Search intent: Search intent is the real goal behind a query: to learn, compare, buy, or reach a specific site. The content that best satisfies that intent wins, regardless of how many times it repeats the keyword. It's the number-one criterion for deciding what content format to create.

GEO & AEO

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): GEO is the optimization of a brand's digital presence so that generative AI engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude — cite and recommend it in their answers. It works with entity signals, citable content and mentions in the sources each model consults, not with position rankings.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization): AEO is content optimization for answer engines: featured snippets, Google AI Overviews, voice assistants and direct-answer panels. It means structuring content in question-answer format, with concise definitions, lists, tables and structured data that machines can extract without ambiguity.
Answer engine: An answer engine answers the user's question directly instead of returning a list of links. Perplexity, ChatGPT with search, and Google's AI Overviews are answer engines. For brands the shift is radical: if you're not part of the answer, the user never learns you exist.
AI Overviews: AI Overviews is Google's module that generates an AI answer at the top of the SERP, citing a set of sources. It feeds off Google's index, so solid technical SEO remains a prerequisite — but it favors content with direct answers, verifiable data and entity authority.
LLM (Large Language Model): An LLM is an AI model trained on enormous volumes of text to understand and generate language. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are interfaces on top of LLMs. For marketing, two moments matter: what the model learned during training, and what it retrieves in real time when it searches the web.
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation): RAG is the technique by which an AI system retrieves up-to-date information (from the web or a database) and uses it to compose its answer, citing sources. Perplexity and ChatGPT with search work this way. To appear in those answers, your content must be extractable: self-contained, clear, verifiable passages.
llms.txt: llms.txt is a plain-text file at a website's root (like robots.txt) that summarizes its content in an AI-readable format: what the company is, what services it offers, which pages matter. It's an emerging standard that helps LLM crawlers understand a site without executing JavaScript.
AI crawlers (GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot): AI crawlers are the bots OpenAI, Perplexity, Anthropic and Google use to collect web content for model training or real-time answers. Most don't execute JavaScript: if your site doesn't serve complete HTML from the server (SSR or prerendering), you're invisible to them.
Citable, answer-first content: Citable content is structured so a machine can extract a passage and use it as a complete answer: 40–60 word definitions after each question heading, comparison tables, sourced data and FAQs. GEO studies show that statistics and quotations increase the probability of being cited by an LLM.

Entities & authority

Entity authority: Entity authority is the degree to which Google and AI models recognize a brand as a unique, legitimate and expert entity in its field. It's built with consistent structured data, mentions in trusted sources and content that proves verifiable knowledge. Unlike domain authority, it doesn't measure links: it measures identity and recognition.
Entity: An entity is anything unique and distinguishable that a knowledge system can identify: a person, a company, a place, a product, a concept. Google and LLMs don't just index pages; they build relationships between entities and assign them attributes. Being a recognized entity is the prerequisite for entity authority.
Knowledge Graph: The Knowledge Graph is Google's entity database: billions of people, companies, places and concepts connected by relationships. It powers Knowledge Panels and helps Google disambiguate brands. Getting into the Knowledge Graph — via structured data, Wikidata and consistent mentions — is a measurable entity-authority milestone.
Knowledge Panel: The Knowledge Panel is the information box Google shows to the right of results when it recognizes you're searching for a specific entity: logo, description, key facts, social profiles. Having one confirms Google treats you as an entity. It's earned with structured data, presence in reference sources and brand consistency.
Topical authority: Topical authority is the depth and coverage with which a site treats an entire subject. It's built with content clusters: a pillar page covering the general topic and satellite articles that go deep on each subtopic, all interlinked. A site with topical authority ranks better even with fewer links.
Domain authority: Domain Authority is a Moz metric (not Google's) that estimates, from 0 to 100, the strength of a domain's link profile. It's useful for comparing sites against each other, but it's not an actual ranking factor. Confusing it with the authority Google assigns your brand is one of SEO's most common mistakes.
NAP (Name, Address, Phone): NAP is a business's identity data: name, address and phone. They must be exactly the same on the website, Google Business Profile, directories and social networks. NAP consistency is a basic identity signal both for local SEO and for AI models to disambiguate your brand from similar ones.
sameAs: sameAs is the Schema.org property that declares an entity on your site is the same one appearing elsewhere: LinkedIn, Wikidata, Crunchbase, social networks. It's the most direct way to tell Google and LLMs "all these profiles are the same person or company," consolidating scattered signals into a single identity.
Backlink & brand mention: A backlink is a link from another site to yours; a brand mention is your name appearing without a link. Classic SEO valued only links. In the LLM era, a link-less mention in an authoritative source also builds entity authority, because models learn from text, not hyperlinks.

Technical SEO

Schema.org / structured data: Schema.org is the standard vocabulary for describing a page's content in machine-readable format: what an organization, person, service, article or FAQ is. Implemented in JSON-LD, it enables rich results on Google and is the most reliable identity source for AI crawlers.
JSON-LD & @graph: JSON-LD is Google's recommended format for publishing structured data: a JSON block inside the page, separate from the visible HTML. A @graph groups several entities in a single block and connects them with @id references — for example, Person works-for Organization — forming an entity graph machines resolve without ambiguity.
Canonical URL: The canonical URL is the official version of a page when variants exist (with or without trailing slash, with www, with parameters). It's declared with the link rel="canonical" tag. Without it, search engines split the same page's signals across several URLs and none ranks at full strength.
Hreflang: Hreflang is the tag that tells search engines which language or region version of a page to show each user. A bilingual site must declare each pair (es/en) plus an x-default. Without hreflang, Google may show the wrong version or treat translations as duplicate content.
XML sitemap: The XML sitemap is the file listing all of a site's indexable URLs with their last-modified date. It's the main way search engines discover new content. An accurate lastmod matters more than manual pings: Google deprecated sitemap pings in 2023 and now relies on the declared change frequency.
Prerendering / SSG / SSR: Prerendering (SSG) generates each page's complete HTML at build time; SSR generates it on every request. Both guarantee that JavaScript-less crawlers — including ChatGPT's and Perplexity's — read the full content. A React site that only renders client-side is empty text to most AI bots.
IndexNow: IndexNow is an open protocol for notifying search engines the moment you publish or update a URL, instead of waiting for a crawl. Bing, Yandex and others use it — and Bing's index feeds ChatGPT search and DuckDuckGo. Google doesn't support it; for Google, the sitemap still rules.

Performance

Core Web Vitals: Core Web Vitals are the three metrics Google uses to measure a site's real loading experience: LCP (main element load speed), INP (interaction responsiveness) and CLS (visual stability). They're measured with real-user data (CrUX) and are part of Google's page experience signals.
LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): LCP measures how long it takes to paint the largest visible element on a page — usually the main image or headline. Google's "good" threshold is 2.5 seconds. You improve it by optimizing the LCP image (modern format, fetchpriority="high"), removing render-blocking resources and serving from a CDN.
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): CLS measures how much page content shifts while loading — the jumps that make you lose your place or tap the wrong button. The "good" threshold is 0.1. The most common cause: images without declared width and height attributes, forcing the browser to recalculate layout when they arrive.

Go deeper

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