Glossary

SEO & AI Search Glossary

Plain-English definitions of 8 SEO and AI-search terms. Every entry is answer-first and checked against a primary source, so you can quote it and move on.

AI search & GEO

How AI answer engines find, trust and cite your pages. The terms behind AI Overviews, ChatGPT search and Perplexity.

AI Overviews AI Overviews are Google's AI-generated answer summaries shown at the top of search results, above the classic blue links. They use Gemini models to pull together information from multiple web pages and cite the sources those answers draw from.
Generative Engine Optimization Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of structuring content and entity signals so AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) cite or mention you when they generate answers. The term was coined in a 2023 academic paper that measured content edits lifting visibility up to 40%.
llms.txt llms.txt is a proposed root-level Markdown file (served at /llms.txt) that lists a site's key pages in a clean, LLM-friendly format to help AI models find and read your content. It is voluntary, and no major AI search engine has confirmed using it as a ranking signal as of 2026.

Technical SEO

Crawling, indexing, rendering and the machinery that decides whether search engines can read your site at all.

On-page SEO

Titles, headings, internal links and the on-page signals that tell a search engine what a page is about.

internal linking Internal linking is the practice of adding hyperlinks from one page of a website to another page on the same site. These links help search engines discover pages, pass ranking signals like PageRank between them, and help users navigate.

Content & E-E-A-T

Content quality, expertise and trust, and what Google and AI models weigh when they decide who to believe.

E-E-A-T E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It is a concept from Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines that human raters use to judge content quality. It is not a direct ranking factor, but Google's systems reward pages that show these signals.