Terminology in AI search is moving fast enough that even practitioners mix up terms week to week. This glossary covers the classic SEO vocabulary alongside the newer GEO/AEO terms, grouped by theme rather than strict alphabetical order so related concepts sit near each other.
Core SEO terms
Crawl budget — The number of URLs a search engine's crawler is willing and able to crawl on your site within a given period. See our full guide to crawl budget optimization.
Core Web Vitals (CWV) — Google's set of page-experience metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
Canonical tag — An HTML element (rel="canonical") that tells search engines which URL is the authoritative version among duplicate or near-duplicate pages.
Topical authority — The degree to which a site is considered a comprehensive, trustworthy source on a given subject, typically built through topic clusters and consistent, in-depth coverage over time.
Domain authority — A third-party metric (not a Google ranking factor itself) estimating a site's overall link-based authority, often used as a proxy for how competitive it will be to rank.
AI search and GEO terms
Generative engine optimization (GEO) — The practice of structuring content so generative AI systems are more likely to cite or reference it in their answers. See our full GEO guide.
Answer engine optimization (AEO) — Used largely interchangeably with GEO, sometimes applied more narrowly to systems producing a single direct answer rather than a conversational response.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) — The technique where an AI system retrieves relevant documents before generating an answer, then grounds its response in — and cites — those documents. This is the mechanism behind most AI Overviews and AI-assistant search features.
Citation rate — An informally defined but increasingly tracked metric: the percentage of relevant test queries where an AI assistant cites your content as a source. See our citation rate case study for one way to measure it.
AI Overview — Google's AI-generated summary shown above traditional search results for many queries, synthesizing an answer from multiple retrieved sources with citations.
Entity SEO — Building clear, consistent, unambiguous associations between your brand and specific concepts, products, or topics, so search and AI systems can confidently match a query to your content. Relies heavily on consistent naming and structured data.
Corroboration — The degree to which a specific claim or data point is echoed, with or without a link, across multiple credible sources — an increasingly important signal for AI citation likelihood. See why traditional link building is shifting.
Speakable schema — A schema.org specification marking specific page content as suitable for text-to-speech, originally built for voice assistants, increasingly relevant for AI systems identifying quotable content.
Answer-first structure — A content-writing pattern where each section opens with a direct, self-contained answer before providing supporting context — the single highest-leverage on-page GEO tactic we've measured.
Content and link building terms
Pillar page — A comprehensive overview article covering a broad topic, linking out to narrower cluster pages. See our topic cluster guide.
Cluster page — A narrower, more specific article covering one subtopic of a pillar page in depth, linking back to the pillar.
Digital PR — A link building and brand-visibility approach centered on creating genuinely newsworthy assets (typically original data) and pitching them to journalists, rather than direct link requests. See our digital PR playbook.
Anchor text — The clickable, visible text of a hyperlink, historically a meaningful relevance signal for the linked page's target keyword, though its weight relative to corroboration signals is shifting in an AI search context.
This glossary will be updated as the field's vocabulary continues to shift — several of these AI-search terms are less than two years old and still settling into consistent industry usage.
