Glossary
SEO & AEO glossary
Marketing is full of jargon. Here’s what the words actually mean, in plain English, for small business owners.
A
- AI Overviews (Google AI Overviews, SGE)
- AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that Google shows at the top of some search results, answering the question directly and linking to a handful of sources.
- Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
- Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of making your business show up, and be described accurately, inside answers generated by AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews.
E
- E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)
- E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, the qualities Google's guidelines use to describe content and creators people can rely on.
G
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO, AI SEO, LLM optimization)
- Generative engine optimization (GEO) means improving how often, and how accurately, your brand appears in answers from generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.
I
- Internal Linking (Internal links)
- Internal linking means linking from one page on your website to another page on the same website, helping visitors and search engines find and understand your content.
L
- llms.txt (LLMs.txt file)
- llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file placed at the root of a website that gives AI tools a short, curated summary of the site and links to its most important pages.
O
- Organic Traffic (Organic search traffic)
- Organic traffic is the visitors who reach your website without you paying for the click, usually from unpaid search results, AI answers, social posts or other websites linking to you.
S
- Schema Markup (Structured data, JSON-LD)
- Schema markup is code added to a web page that describes its content (a business, a person, a service, an article, an FAQ) in a standard format search engines and AI tools can read.
- Search Intent (User intent, Keyword intent)
- Search intent is the goal behind a search: what the person actually wants to know, do or buy when they type (or ask) something.
T
- Topic Cluster (Content cluster, Hub and spoke)
- A topic cluster is a group of related pages, with one main "pillar" page covering a broad topic and several supporting pages covering specific questions, all linked together.
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