Glossary
SEO, AEO & GEO Terms, Explained In Plain English
Search moves fast, and the vocabulary moves with it. Here's a working glossary of the terms you'll hear in any conversation about SEO, AI search and AI visibility — kept current by Agile Digital Strategy.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
- The practice of improving a website so it ranks higher in traditional search engine results, such as Google and Bing.
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)
- Structuring content so answer engines — including featured snippets, AI Overviews and chat-based tools — can extract a precise passage as a direct answer. See our full AEO page.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)
- Optimising your online presence so generative AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini mention, cite or recommend your brand in their answers. See our full GEO page.
- AI Overviews
- Google's AI-generated summary that appears above traditional organic results for many searches, often answering the query without a click-through.
- AI Share of Voice
- The proportion of AI-generated answers, across a set of target queries, in which your brand is mentioned compared to competitors.
- Passage Retrieval
- The process by which search and AI systems identify and extract a specific paragraph or sentence — rather than a whole page — as the answer to a query.
- Crawl Budget
- The number of pages a search engine will crawl on your site within a given time period. Wasted crawl budget on low-value pages can delay indexing of important ones.
- Indexation
- Whether a page has been added to a search engine's index and is therefore eligible to appear in results at all.
- Core Web Vitals
- Google's set of page experience metrics — Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — that measure loading speed, responsiveness and visual stability.
- Schema Markup / Structured Data
- Code (typically JSON-LD) added to a page that describes its content in a standardised format machines can parse reliably. See our Schema Markup page.
- E-E-A-T
- Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust — the framework Google's quality raters use to assess whether content and its author are credible.
- llms.txt
- An emerging convention — similar to robots.txt — for giving AI models a curated, machine-readable summary of a site's key content.
- Citation Authority
- The likelihood that an AI model will treat your content as a trustworthy source worth quoting or linking to, built through consistent, well-sourced, accurate publishing over time.
- NAP Consistency
- Ensuring your business Name, Address and Phone number are identical across your website, directories and citations — a key local SEO trust signal. See our Local SEO page.
- hreflang
- An HTML attribute that tells search engines which language and regional version of a page to serve to a given searcher — essential for exporters targeting the UK and EU.
- AI Crawlers (GPTBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended)
- Automated bots that AI companies use to crawl and index website content for use in generative answers, separate from traditional search engine crawlers.
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