SEO, AEO and GEO terms, in plain words.

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect: a server response that sends visitors and search engines from an old URL to a new one. Use it when a page moves, is renamed or is merged into another, so that links and ranking signals usually carry over to the new address. A temporary move uses a 302 redirect instead.

A 404 error is the response a server gives when the requested page does not exist, shown to visitors as a 'page not found' message. A few 404 errors are normal and do not harm a site as a whole, but broken internal links and removed pages that still earn visits or backlinks should be fixed with a 301 redirect or a restored page.

AEO (answer engine optimization) is the practice of making your content easy for answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI features to understand, trust and quote as the answer to a question. It builds on SEO fundamentals: crawlable pages, direct and accurate answers, and clear structure. No tactic can guarantee a citation.

An AI citation is a link or source reference that an AI answer shows to credit a web page it drew on. Citations are how an AI answer can send readers back to your page, so they are one of the main ways to be visible in ChatGPT search, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. A citation differs from an AI mention, which names a brand without a source link.

An AI crawler is an automated program that an AI company uses to fetch web pages, whether to train models, to build a search index or to open a page when a user asks. Examples are GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and the Google-Extended token. Most are controlled with robots.txt, and blocking training crawlers does not remove a site from Google Search.

An AI mention is when an AI assistant names your brand, product or website in an answer, usually without linking to it. A mention shows the assistant knows about you but sends no click, unlike an AI citation, which links to the page used as a source. Tracking both gives a fuller picture of your AI visibility than either one alone.

AI Mode is a Google Search experience that answers questions in a conversational, AI-written response with links to sources, and lets people ask follow-up questions. Google says AI Mode and AI Overviews run on its core Search ranking systems, so the same SEO fundamentals apply, and clicks from them are counted in Search Console.

AI Overviews are the AI-written summaries Google sometimes shows at the top of its results, with links to the pages the summary draws on. Google says they run on its core Search ranking systems and need no special markup. They can reduce clicks: a randomized field experiment (SSRN, April 2026) found organic clicks fell about 38-40% on queries where they appeared.

AI visibility is how often and how prominently AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity cite or mention your brand and pages when people ask relevant questions. It is measured by asking those assistants a set of real questions and recording whether you appear, so it is a sample rather than a fixed rank, and answers can differ from one run to the next.

Alt text is a short written description of an image, placed in the image's alt attribute in the HTML. Screen readers read it aloud for people who cannot see the image, it appears if the image fails to load, and search engines use it to understand what the image shows. Describe the image in plain words and do not stuff it with keywords.

Anchor text is the visible, clickable words of a link. Search engines use it as a clue to what the linked page is about, so descriptive anchor text such as 'canonical tag guide' helps more than 'click here'. Repeating the same exact-match phrase in many links can look manipulative, so keep it natural and varied.

An answer engine is a search tool that responds to a question with a direct, written answer instead of only a list of links. ChatGPT search, Perplexity and Google's AI Mode are examples. They usually show the sources they used, which is why being clear, accurate and easy to quote matters for getting your page chosen.

A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Search engines treat links from relevant, trusted sites as a sign that a page is worth reading, so earned backlinks can help rankings, while bought or manipulative links can break Google's spam policies. Quality and relevance matter far more than the raw number of links.

A canonical tag is a link element with rel="canonical" in a page's head that tells search engines which URL is the main version when several addresses show the same or very similar content. It gathers ranking signals on one address, for example when a product page opens with and without tracking parameters. Google treats it as a strong hint, not a command.

Core Web Vitals are Google's three measures of how a page feels to use: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) for loading speed, Interaction to Next Paint (INP) for responsiveness, and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) for visual stability. Google's 'good' thresholds are LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP within 200 milliseconds and CLS of 0.1 or less. They are one page experience signal among many.

Crawl budget is the number of URLs a search engine's crawler is willing and able to fetch from your site in a given period, set by your server's capacity and by how much the engine wants your content. It rarely matters for small sites. It matters for very large or fast-changing ones, where crawls wasted on duplicate or parameter URLs delay the discovery of important pages.

A crawler is a program that visits web pages by following links and downloads what it finds so a search engine or AI system can read it. The visit is called a crawl, and Googlebot is Google's main crawler. If a crawler cannot fetch a page, for example because the server blocks it or returns an error, the page's content usually cannot be indexed or cited.

Domain authority is a score from 1 to 100, created by Moz, that estimates how well a whole website might rank, based mainly on its backlinks. It is a third-party metric, not a Google ranking factor, and Google does not use it. Treat it as a rough yardstick for comparing sites; similar scores exist elsewhere, such as Ahrefs' Domain Rating.

Duplicate content is the same or very similar text available at more than one URL, on your own site or across different sites. In most cases it is not a penalty, but it can split ranking signals and let the wrong URL appear in results. Canonical tags, 301 redirects and consistent internal links point search engines to the version you want.

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, the qualities Google's search quality guidelines ask human raters to look for in content. It is not a single score or a direct ranking factor, but Google's systems aim to reward content that shows these qualities, and trust matters most. Named authors, first-hand knowledge and accurate sources help show it.

A featured snippet is a highlighted box at the top of Google's results that quotes an answer from a web page and links to it. It can be a paragraph, a list or a table. Pages that answer a question clearly in a short passage, and already rank on the first page, are the usual candidates.

A generative engine is a search or answer system that uses a large language model to write a new response, often with cited sources, instead of only ranking existing pages. ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode are examples. The term is the base of generative engine optimization (GEO).

GEO (generative engine optimization) is the practice of improving how often and how favorably generative AI systems cite or mention your content in the answers they write. The 2024 Princeton and IIT Delhi GEO paper found that adding statistics and cited sources raised visibility by up to about a third, while keyword stuffing did worst. Evidence for most other tactics is still thin.

Google Search Console is a free Google tool that shows how your site performs in Google Search: which queries bring impressions and clicks, which pages are indexed and which have problems. You use it to submit a sitemap, inspect a URL and request indexing. Google says traffic from its AI features is counted in Search Console reporting.

Google-Extended is a robots.txt token that lets a site say whether its content may be used to train Gemini models and to ground Gemini answers. Blocking it does not affect how pages rank in Google Search, and it is not a separate crawler. AI Overviews and AI Mode are controlled through the normal Search controls instead.

GPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler, which collects public web content for training OpenAI's models. OpenAI runs two other agents: OAI-SearchBot, which builds the ChatGPT search index, and ChatGPT-User, which fetches a page when a user asks. You can allow or block each in robots.txt, though OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply to ChatGPT-User.

An H1 tag is the HTML element that marks a page's main heading, the top-level title of the content people see on the page. It tells readers and search engines what the page is about. Best practice is one clear H1 per page that matches its main topic. It is separate from the title tag, which is the headline shown in search results.

hreflang is an annotation, set in HTML, in a sitemap or in HTTP headers, that tells search engines which language or regional version of a page to show to which audience, such as en-IN for English in India or hi-IN for Hindi. Each version should list all the others and itself, so that the right version appears in each country or language.

Indexing is the step where a search engine analyzes a crawled page and stores it in its index, the database it draws results from. A page that is not indexed cannot appear in results, however good it is. Common blockers are a noindex tag, thin or duplicate content, and pages the engine chose not to keep. Google Search Console shows each URL's index status.

An internal link is a link from one page of your website to another page on the same site. Internal links help visitors move around and help crawlers discover pages and understand how topics relate, so important pages should be linked from other relevant pages with descriptive anchor text. A page with no internal links pointing to it is called an orphan page.

JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) is a format for writing structured data as a block of code, usually in a script element of type application/ld+json, instead of mixing it into the visible HTML. Google recommends it for schema markup. It states facts such as a product's price or an article's author in a way machines can read.

A keyword is a word or phrase that people type or say into a search engine, and that you target in your content to match what they are looking for. Keywords show which topics have demand and which words your audience uses, but modern engines match meaning, so writing naturally about the topic matters more than repeating the exact phrase.

A large language model (LLM) is an AI system trained on very large amounts of text to predict and generate language, which lets it answer questions, summarize and write. ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude run on LLMs. AI search tools often pair an LLM with live web retrieval so that an answer can cite current sources instead of relying only on what the model learned in training.

llms.txt is a proposed file, written in Markdown and placed at the root of a site, that lists and summarizes a site's key pages for large language models. Google says it does not use llms.txt for Search, and an Ahrefs study of 137,210 domains found 97% of these files received zero requests in May 2026. Publishing one is cheap but is not a proven way to earn AI citations.

A long-tail keyword is a longer, more specific search phrase, such as 'running shoes for flat feet', that few people search but that shows clear intent. Each phrase brings little traffic alone, yet together they add up, are usually less competitive and often convert better than broad terms like 'running shoes'.

A meta description is an HTML tag that summarizes a page in a sentence or two. Google may show it as the snippet under your title in results, but often writes its own from the page text. It does not directly affect rankings, yet a clear one can earn more clicks. Google sets no official length limit, and long descriptions are cut off in results.

Noindex is an instruction, set in a robots meta tag or an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, that tells search engines not to keep a page in their index, so it will not appear in results. Use it for pages that should work but not be found, such as thank-you pages. The page must stay crawlable: a crawler blocked in robots.txt never sees the noindex.

Organic traffic is the visits a website gets from unpaid search results, as opposed to paid ads, social media, email or direct visits. It is the main thing SEO aims to grow, and it is measured in analytics tools or as clicks in Google Search Console. Clicks from Google's AI features are counted in Search Console, while visits from other AI assistants often appear as referrals.

People Also Ask (PAA) is a Google results feature: a box of related questions that expand to show a short answer taken from a web page, with new questions appearing as you open them. It shows what else searchers wonder about a topic. A page that answers a question in one direct sentence is a good candidate to be the source.

Programmatic SEO is the practice of generating many landing pages from a template and a data set, such as one page per city or per product comparison, to capture many long-tail searches. Done with useful, unique data it can work well. Done to mass-produce thin pages mainly to rank, it falls under Google's scaled content abuse policy.

robots.txt is a plain-text file at the root of a website, such as example.com/robots.txt, that tells crawlers which URLs they may or may not fetch. It controls crawling, not indexing: a blocked URL can still appear in results if other sites link to it, and it is not a security tool. It is also where you allow or block AI crawlers such as GPTBot.

Scaled content abuse is a Google spam policy violation: producing many pages mainly to manipulate search rankings rather than to help people, however the pages are made, whether by AI, by humans or by a mix. Thin, unedited, mass-produced pages are the target. AI-written content is not penalized just for being AI-written.

Schema markup is code added to a page that labels its content, such as a product's price or an article's author, using the shared Schema.org vocabulary; it is also called structured data. It can make a page eligible for rich results. Google says it is not required for its AI features, and a May 2026 Ahrefs study of 1,885 pages found no meaningful lift in AI citations.

Search intent is the goal behind a search: what the person actually wants to find, know or do. The four common types are informational (learn something), navigational (reach a specific site), commercial (compare options) and transactional (buy or sign up). A page ranks well when its content and format match the intent of the query, so check what already ranks before you write.

SEO (search engine optimization) is the practice of improving a website so that search engines can find, understand and rank its pages, which brings more unpaid visits from people searching. It covers technical health, helpful content and links from other sites. Google says the same fundamentals apply to its AI features, so SEO still underpins visibility in AI search.

SERP stands for search engine results page, the page a search engine shows after someone enters a query. A SERP can include ads, organic links, featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, maps, images and AI Overviews, so the first organic result may sit well below the top of the screen. What surrounds your link on the SERP shapes how many people click it.

A sitemap is a file that lists the URLs of a website you want search engines to find, most often an XML sitemap at an address such as example.com/sitemap.xml. It helps crawlers discover new and updated pages, especially on large or new sites with few links, but it does not guarantee that a page will be crawled or indexed. You can submit it in Google Search Console.

A title tag is the HTML title element that names a web page; it appears as the clickable headline in search results and in the browser tab. It is one of the clearest signals of a page's topic, so put the main subject near the start and keep it specific. Google may rewrite titles it thinks describe a page poorly, and long titles are cut off in results.

Topical authority is how thoroughly and credibly a website covers a subject, built by publishing connected, accurate content on a topic and its subtopics. A topic cluster is the usual structure: one broad pillar page linked to several detailed pages that answer related questions. Topical authority is an industry concept, not a ranking factor Google names.

A zero-click search is a search that ends without a click to any website because the answer appears on the results page itself, for example in a featured snippet or an AI Overview. SparkToro data from early 2026 found about 68% of US Google searches ended without a click, up from 49% in 2019. Being seen in the answer now matters, not only getting the visit.