Glossary
Semantic SEO & AI search glossary
Plain-English definitions of the concepts behind modern SEO and AI search visibility: semantic SEO, entities, GEO, AEO, AI Overviews and the technical foundations. Every term covers why it matters, how it works and what to do about it.
Semantic SEO
Semantic SEO
Semantic SEO is optimizing a website for meaning rather than individual keywords: covering the entities, attributes and questions a search engine associates with a topic, so the site is understood as a complete and reliable source on it.
Topical map
A topical map is a structured plan of every subtopic a website needs to cover to be seen as complete on a subject, organized by how the subtopics relate and prioritized by business value.
Topical authority
Topical authority is the degree to which search engines treat a website as a dependable source on a whole topic, earned by covering it thoroughly, accurately and consistently, with pages that link to and reinforce each other.
Source context
Source context is the purpose and identity of a website as search engines understand it: who the site is, what it offers and why it exists.
Entities
Entity
In search, an entity is a uniquely identifiable thing (a person, organization, place, product or concept) that a search engine stores along with its attributes and its relationships to other entities.
Entity SEO
Entity SEO is making it unambiguous which entities your pages are about and how they relate, through clear language, consistent naming, internal links and structured data, so search engines and AI assistants connect your brand to the right topics.
Knowledge Graph
Google's Knowledge Graph is a database of entities and the facts and relationships between them, launched in 2012.
Content
Semantic content brief
A semantic content brief is a writing brief that specifies the intent, questions, entities, attributes, heading structure and internal links a page needs, so the writer produces content that satisfies both the reader and the topic's semantic requirements.
Search intent
Search intent is the goal behind a query: what the person actually wants to know, do or buy.
Information gain
Information gain is how much new, useful information a page adds compared with what already ranks for the same topic.
E-E-A-T
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust: the qualities Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines use to judge whether content and its creators are reliable.
Keyword cannibalization
Keyword cannibalization happens when several pages on the same site target the same intent, so they compete with each other and none ranks as well as one strong page would.
AI search
AEO (answer engine optimization)
AEO, or answer engine optimization, is structuring content so it can be selected as the direct answer to a question: in featured snippets, voice assistants, People Also Ask and AI-generated answers.
GEO (generative engine optimization)
GEO, or generative engine optimization, is improving how often and how accurately AI systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews mention, cite and recommend a brand in the answers they generate.
Google AI Overviews
Google AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries shown at the top of some search results, with links to the sources used.
Query fan-out
Query fan-out is a technique used by AI search systems, including Google's AI Mode: one query is broken into several related sub-queries that are searched in parallel, and the results are combined into a single answer.
Passage retrieval
Passage retrieval is finding and using the most relevant section of a page rather than the page as a whole.
Zero-click search
A zero-click search is a search that ends on the results page without a click to any website, because the answer was shown directly in a snippet, Knowledge Panel, AI Overview or other feature.
llms.txt
llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file at the root of a website (/llms.txt) that summarizes the site and links to its most important pages in a format easy for large language models to read.
Technical SEO
Structured data (schema markup)
Structured data is code, usually JSON-LD using the schema.org vocabulary, that states in machine-readable form what a page is and what it contains: an article, a product, a person, an organization, an FAQ, a video and their properties.
Internal linking
Internal linking is linking between pages on your own site.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the work that makes a website crawlable, indexable, fast and correctly understood: site architecture, crawling and indexing controls, page speed, mobile usability, structured data, redirects and canonicalization.
Crawl budget
Crawl budget is the number of URLs a search engine is willing and able to crawl on a site in a given period, determined by crawl capacity (what the server can handle) and crawl demand (how much the search engine wants the content).
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are Google's metrics for real-user page experience: Largest Contentful Paint (loading, good at 2.5 seconds or less), Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness, good at 200 ms or less) and Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability, good at 0.1 or less).
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