Glossary

Answer Engine Optimization. Structuring content so an AI system can pull out a direct, accurate answer without needing to interpret an entire page.

AI systems, often multiple agents working together, that pursue a goal with real autonomy: deciding what to do next, not just how to do what they were told. The term is used inconsistently across vendors.

Generative AI paired with tools, memory, and a task loop so it can complete a job with limited supervision, rather than just answering a single prompt.

When an AI-generated answer explicitly references or links to a specific page as the source of a claim, rather than answering without attribution.

A bot operated by an AI company that either trains models on web content, builds a search index for an AI assistant, or fetches a specific page when a user asks the assistant to.

The three jobs follow different rules. Blocking one does not block the others: disallowing a training crawler like GPTBot in robots.txt does nothing to stop a search-index crawler like OAI-SearchBot from citing the same page.

Google's fully conversational search experience, where a query returns a synthesized response built from multiple sources instead of a list of links.

The AI-generated summary Google shows above traditional search results for certain queries, drawing from several sources at once.

Search experiences where an AI system reads, synthesizes, and answers directly (Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and similar) rather than returning only a ranked list of links.

An HTML tag that tells search engines which URL is the official version of a page when duplicate or near-duplicate versions exist.

Google's specific metrics for real-world page experience: how fast the main content loads, how quickly the page responds to interaction, and how visually stable it stays while loading.

The process where a bot, a search engine's or an AI system's, visits a page and reads its content, following links to discover more pages.

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness: the framework Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines use to describe what separates genuinely helpful, credible content from content that merely looks the part.

E-E-A-T isn't a direct ranking factor Google scores a page against; it's the lens human quality raters use to evaluate search results, which in turn informs how Google's automated ranking systems are trained and tuned over time.

A specific, identifiable thing (a person, brand, place, or concept) that a search engine treats as a distinct, understood unit, not just a string of text.

AI that generates new text, images, audio, or code when prompted, based on patterns learned from its training data. It produces output on request and doesn't act independently or verify that output against the real world.

Generative Engine Optimization. Making sure AI systems can actually access, correctly interpret, and trust a page enough to use it as a source in a generated answer.

An HTML attribute that tells search engines which language and regional version of a page to show a given searcher, when a site publishes the same content in multiple locales.

Hreflang tags must be reciprocal: every language version of a page needs to reference every other version, including itself. A one-directional or missing return link is the most common way hreflang implementations silently fail.

The process of a search engine storing and organizing a crawled page so it can actually be returned in search results.

Google's original algorithm for scoring a page's importance based on the quantity and quality of links pointing to it. The term is now used loosely for "link authority" generally, even though Google's actual ranking systems have evolved well past the original formula.

The step where a browser, or a bot simulating one, executes a page's JavaScript and CSS to see the final version a human visitor would see. Distinct from just reading the raw HTML.

Search results that display extra visual elements (star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, recipe times, product prices) beyond a plain blue link and description. Eligibility depends on valid structured data for a type Google currently supports.

A text file at a site's root that tells crawlers which parts of the site they're allowed or not allowed to visit.

Code added to a page, usually JSON-LD, that explicitly labels what different pieces of content mean, so a search engine doesn't have to guess.

What a person actually wants when they type a query: to learn something, to compare options, or to take an action like buying or signing up.

Search Engine Optimization. Making a website easier for search engines to crawl, understand, and rank appropriately, and easier for a human visitor to actually use.