Clear, citable definitions for every term in modern search.
The practice of improving a site's organic visibility on search engines like Google and Bing. Modern SEO spans three signal families: technical health (crawlability, Core Web Vitals, indexability), content relevance (matching intent, covering entities), and authority (links, brand mentions, track record).
Shaping content and entities so generative engines — ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Claude — surface and cite your brand inside their answers. GEO rewards being the clearest canonical source for a claim: self-contained quotable passages, consistent entity markup, and presence in the sources AI retrieval pipelines actually read.
Optimizing content to win direct answers rather than blue links: featured snippets, People-Also-Ask, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and voice assistants. The core toolkit is structured Q&A formatting, FAQPage/HowTo schema, and answers that fit in one tight, extractable paragraph.
A plain-text manifest at /llms.txt that tells AI crawlers what your site is about and which pages matter most — a curated map for language models, analogous to robots.txt but for steering rather than blocking. Proposed in 2024, it is increasingly read by AI crawlers and costs minutes to maintain.
Google's user-experience metrics — LCP (Largest Contentful Paint, loading), CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift, visual stability) and INP (Interaction to Next Paint, responsiveness) — measured on real users and used as a ranking signal. Passing thresholds: LCP ≤ 2.5s, CLS ≤ 0.1, INP ≤ 200ms.
Structured data, usually JSON-LD, embedded in a page so machines can understand its meaning: Organization, Product, FAQPage, Article, HowTo. Schema powers rich results in classic search and gives AI engines unambiguous facts to cite — one of the highest-leverage, lowest-risk fixes in modern search.
A uniquely identifiable thing — a brand, person, product or concept — that search and AI systems resolve across the web. Entity SEO means making your entities unambiguous: consistent naming, sameAs links to authoritative profiles, and schema that ties pages to the entities they describe.
The highlighted answer box at the top of Google results, extracted from a page that answers the query directly. Winning one typically requires a concise answer paragraph (40–60 words) placed immediately after a heading that mirrors the question.
Google's AI-generated summary shown above classic results, synthesized from multiple sources with citation links. Being cited in AI Overviews is an AEO outcome: it rewards extractable, well-structured, factually-consistent content more than raw domain authority.
The number of pages a search engine will fetch from your site in a given period. Large or frequently-changing sites protect crawl budget by eliminating duplicate URLs, fixing redirect chains, and keeping sitemaps clean so crawlers spend their visits on pages that matter.
The single authoritative URL for a piece of content, declared with a rel=canonical tag. Canonicals consolidate ranking signals when the same content is reachable at multiple addresses — the standard cure for parameter, pagination and syndication duplication.
Links between pages of the same site. They distribute authority, define topical clusters, and give crawlers (and AI retrieval) the shortest path to important pages. Anchor text is a strong relevance hint — descriptive anchors beat “click here” everywhere.