SEO & AI search glossary

AI content detection is the attempt to judge from text alone whether a language model wrote it, usually by scoring how statistically predictable the wording is, and always producing a probability rather than proof of authorship.

Google AI Overviews are AI-generated answers shown above the standard results for some queries, assembled from passages on several web pages and displayed with links to the sources they were drawn from.

An AI tell is a recognisable habit of machine-written prose — a formulaic opener, symmetrical paragraphs, hedged non-answers — that signals to a reader the text was generated rather than written by someone who knows the subject.

AI visibility is the degree to which an AI assistant names or cites your site when answering questions in your subject area, measured across a fixed set of queries rather than as a single ranking position.

Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of writing and marking up a page so that an answer engine (an AI Overview, a featured snippet, a chat assistant) can extract, verify and quote a passage from it.

A canonical URL is the single address a site declares as the preferred version of a page, usually with a rel=canonical link element, so search engines consolidate duplicate or near-duplicate copies onto that one URL.

Citation rate is the proportion of AI-assistant answers, across a fixed set of questions asked repeatedly, that name or link your site as a source rather than crediting someone else.

Content refresh is the deliberate updating of an already published page — its facts, structure, coverage and internal links — so it keeps matching current search demand, instead of being replaced by a new URL.

Crawl budget is the number of URLs a search engine will fetch from a site over a period, set by how much crawling the server can absorb and how much the engine wants the site's pages.

Cross-model validation is the practice of having AI-written content checked by models from a different vendor than the one that wrote it, so the fact-check, novelty score and quality critique never come from the writer.

Drip publishing is releasing finished articles on a steady, spaced schedule — a few a week rather than a batch at once — so a site's output grows at a rate search engines and readers can absorb.

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness — the four qualities Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines ask human raters to weigh when judging how far a page and its creator can be relied on.

The editor-in-chief model is an editorial arrangement where one named person owns a publication's standards, scope and corrections while others, increasingly software, do the drafting, so accountability for what publishes stays with a human.

FAQPage schema is JSON-LD structured data that marks up a list of questions and the site's own answers on a page, so search engines and AI assistants can read each pair as a discrete question and answer.

First-party data in content is information a business records and holds itself — product data, supplier documents, support tickets, buyer questions — used as the factual basis for claims a competitor cannot look up.

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of making a site's content retrievable, verifiable and quotable, so that AI engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews cite it when they compose an answer.

The helpful content system was Google's site-wide classifier, launched in August 2022, that demoted content written mainly for search engines; since March 2024 its signals run inside Google's core ranking systems.

IndexNow is an open protocol for telling participating search engines that a URL has been added, updated or removed, so they can recrawl it promptly instead of waiting to rediscover the change on their own schedule.

Internal linking is the practice of connecting the pages of one website to each other with in-content hyperlinks, so readers and crawlers can move between related pages and search engines can infer which pages matter most.

JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) is a W3C format that embeds structured data in a page as a JSON block, telling search engines and assistants what the content represents — a product, an article, an FAQ.

Keyword difficulty is a third-party score, usually 0–100, estimating how hard it would be to rank on page one for a term, derived mainly from the backlink strength of the pages already ranking.

LLM SEO is the practice of writing and structuring pages so that a large language model retrieves them, trusts them and quotes them in its answer, with your domain named as the source.

llms.txt is a proposed convention: a markdown file at a site's root that lists its most important pages, each with a short description, so an AI model can find and read them without crawling the whole site.

A novelty score measures how much new information a draft contributes compared with the pages already ranking for its target keyword, and is used as a pass-or-fail gate before that draft is allowed to publish.

People Also Ask is the expandable list of related questions Google shows inside its search results; each row opens to reveal a short answer extracted from a page, with a link to the page it came from.

Programmatic SEO is the practice of generating many search-targeted pages from a data source and one shared template, one page per row, so a site covers a large set of related queries without hand-writing each page.

Google Search Console is Google's free service that reports how a site performs in Google Search: the queries it appeared for, the clicks and impressions it earned, and which of its pages Google has crawled and indexed.

Search intent is the goal behind a query — what the person actually wants to do or know — which search engines infer from behaviour and express through the kinds of pages they choose to rank for it.

A topic cluster is a set of pages covering one subject together: a broad hub page plus narrower pages answering the specific questions inside it, linked to each other so the set reads as one body of coverage.

Topical authority is how completely a site covers one subject: enough interlinked pages answering the real questions inside it that search engines and AI assistants treat the site as a dependable source on that topic.