Glossary
Marketing jargon, decoded.
16 terms, each one linked to the check or fix that acts on it.
- AI crawler
- An AI crawler is an automated fetcher operated by a model provider that reads web pages either to answer a user's question in real time or to build training data.
- Answer engine optimisation (AEO)
- Answer engine optimisation is the practice of structuring a site so that AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews name and cite it when answering a question, rather than optimising for a position in a list of links.
- Canonical tag
- A canonical tag is a link element that names the preferred URL for a page, telling search engines which version to index when the same content is reachable at more than one address.
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Click-through rate is the share of people who saw a result in search and clicked it, calculated as clicks divided by impressions.
- Core Web Vitals
- Core Web Vitals are Google's three field-measured performance metrics: Largest Contentful Paint for loading, Interaction to Next Paint for responsiveness, and Cumulative Layout Shift for visual stability.
- E-E-A-T
- E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, the qualities Google's quality rater guidelines ask human evaluators to assess in a page and its author.
- Entity
- An entity is a thing a search or answer engine can identify and hold facts about, such as a company, a person, a product or a place, as distinct from the words used to describe it.
- Extractability
- Extractability is whether a page's meaningful content is present in the HTML the server returns, before any JavaScript runs.
- Generative engine optimisation (GEO)
- Generative engine optimisation is the practice of influencing how a brand appears inside AI-generated output, covering both whether it is named and how it is described.
- Internal link
- An internal link is a link from one page of a site to another page on the same site, used to pass authority, establish topical relationships and give crawlers a path through the site.
- llms.txt
- llms.txt is a plain-text file at the root of a site that lists the pages worth quoting and says what each one answers, acting as a curated map for language models rather than a complete index.
- Orphan page
- An orphan page is a page that exists and is reachable by URL but has no internal links pointing at it from anywhere else on the site.
- robots.txt
- robots.txt is a file at the root of a site that tells automated crawlers which paths they may request, using per-agent rules.
- Striking distance
- Striking distance describes keywords where a page already ranks roughly between positions four and twenty, close enough that a modest improvement produces a visible traffic change.
- Structured data
- Structured data is machine-readable markup, usually JSON-LD, that states what a page is about in a defined vocabulary rather than leaving it to be inferred from the prose.
- Unlinked mention
- An unlinked mention is an occurrence of a brand name on another site that does not carry a hyperlink back to it.
Definitions are cheap. The audit is the useful part.
Run it on your own site and see which of these terms is currently costing you something.