Web Design, SEO and AEO Glossary: 50 Terms Explained Simply

The practice of making your pages the source AI answer engines quote and cite. It's built on normal SEO plus clear, extractable answers.

Optimizing to be mentioned and recommended in AI-generated answers. The term comes from academic research and has nothing to do with geographic targeting.

Another name for improving how large language models describe and cite your brand. It overlaps almost entirely with AEO and GEO.

Google's AI-generated summary shown above or among search results, with links to the sources it draws on.

A conversational search experience in Google that answers with an AI response and supports follow-up questions, citing web sources.

A search that ends without a click to any website, because the answer appears on the results page itself.

When an AI system splits one question into several sub-queries, searches each, and combines the results into one answer.

A method where an AI model retrieves documents first, then writes its answer using them. It's why live web pages can appear in AI answers.

The share of relevant AI answers that mention or cite your brand, usually measured across a fixed set of buyer prompts.

A proposed text file that lists a site's key pages for AI models. It's optional, and there's no proven effect on citations.

Search engine results page: everything shown after a search, including ads, organic results, AI Overviews and other features.

A highlighted excerpt from one page shown near the top of the results to answer a question directly.

A box of related questions on the results page, each expanding to a short answer from a web page.

An information box about an entity, such as a company or person, drawn from Google's knowledge of that entity.

The percentage of people who click your unpaid result after seeing it. AI Overviews have pushed it down for many queries.

What the searcher is trying to do: learn, compare, buy or reach a specific site. Pages rank when they match it.

A search result with extra visual detail, such as ratings or FAQs, often enabled by structured data.

Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: the qualities Google's quality guidelines use to describe helpful, reliable content.

A broad page that covers a topic and links to more detailed pages on each subtopic.

A pillar page plus the related pages it links to, all interlinked, covering one subject in depth.

The trust a site earns by covering a subject completely, which helps it rank and get cited across that subject.

Making sure search engines and AI models clearly understand who your company is, what it does and how it relates to other things.

A specific, longer search phrase with lower volume, often from buyers closer to a decision.

A tool's estimate of how hard it is to rank for a keyword, based mostly on the strength of pages already ranking.

A link from another website to yours. It remains a ranking signal, but it's only part of how trust is judged.

A third-party score estimating a site's ranking strength from its links. It's a tool metric, not something Google uses.

Your company named on another site, linked or not. Mentions are closely tied to visibility in AI answers.

When a bot fetches your pages and follows links to discover more of them.

When a search engine stores a crawled page so it can appear in results. Crawled doesn't always mean indexed.

A file listing the URLs you want search engines to find, usually at /sitemap.xml.

A file that tells crawlers which parts of a site they may fetch. It's also where you allow or block AI crawlers.

A tag that tells search engines which URL is the main version when several URLs show the same content.

A permanent redirect from one URL to another, which passes most of the old page's signals to the new one.

Structured data added to a page to describe its content, such as an article, FAQ or organization.

The script format Google recommends for adding schema markup to a page.

Links between pages on your own site. They help crawlers find pages and show how topics relate.

Building a page's HTML on the server, so bots that don't run JavaScript still see the content.

Google's page experience metrics for loading, responsiveness and visual stability: LCP, INP and CLS.

Meta tags that control the title, description and image shown when a page is shared on social platforms.

The percentage of visitors who complete a goal, such as booking a demo or signing up.

The prompt that asks a visitor to take the next step, usually a button or link.

The share of sessions that lasted over ten seconds, viewed two or more pages, or triggered a key event. It replaced bounce rate as GA4's main measure.

An action you mark as important in GA4, such as a form submission. GA4 previously called these conversions.

The rule for dividing credit for a conversion among the visits and channels that led to it.

A conversion where a page or channel was part of the path but not the last touch.

Visits that arrive from AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude, tracked with a custom channel group.

A page built for one audience and one action, often the destination of an ad or campaign.

The first section of a page, with the headline, supporting line and main call to action.

A simple layout sketch showing structure and content order without visual design.

A shared set of components, styles and rules that keeps a site or product consistent.