SEO & AI Terms Explained
Your comprehensive guide to the terminology behind modern search optimisation and artificial intelligence.
C
Canonical Tag
An HTML element that designates the preferred version of a webpage when multiple URLs contain identical or similar content, helping search engines consolidate duplicate pages.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals is a set of standardised metrics maintained by Google that measure real-world user experience across loading, interactivity, and visual stability dimensions.
Cosine Similarity
Cosine similarity is a mathematical measure that quantifies the similarity between two non-zero vectors by calculating the cosine of the angle between them, producing values from -1 to 1.
Crawl Budget
Crawl budget is the number of URLs that Googlebot can and wants to crawl on a website within a given timeframe, determined by crawl capacity and demand factors.
E
E-E-A-T
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness: Google's quality assessment framework used by human raters to evaluate content credibility, particularly for YMYL topics.
Entities
Entities in SEO are uniquely identifiable, well-defined concepts that search engines recognise through structured knowledge bases, enabling semantic understanding rather than keyword matching.
Entity Optimisation
Entity Optimisation enhances how distinct identifiable things are represented to search engines and AI systems through structured data, consistent naming, and clear relationships.
H
Hreflang Tags
HTML attribute telling search engines the language and optional region of webpage content, enabling proper serving of multilingual and multi-regional variants.
K
Knowledge Graph
A knowledge graph is a structured representation of real-world entities and their relationships, organized as nodes and edges, enabling machines to understand meaning and context rather than keywords.
N
Noindex Tag
A noindex tag is an HTML meta tag or HTTP response header that instructs search engines not to include a specific webpage in their search results.
P
Programmatic SEO
Programmatic SEO creates large volumes of SEO-optimized pages using templates, structured data, and automated systems to target thousands of keyword variations simultaneously.
R
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is an AI technique that enhances large language models by retrieving relevant information from external knowledge sources before generating responses, avoiding retraining costs.
robots.txt
robots.txt is a plain text file implementing the Robots Exclusion Protocol that communicates crawling preferences to web crawlers, though compliance is entirely voluntary.
S
Structured Data
Structured data in SEO/GEO is standardized Schema.org markup that enables search engines and AI systems to understand page content, creating rich results and improving AI citation accuracy.
T
Topical Authority
A website's demonstrated expertise, credibility, and comprehensive coverage of a specific subject area as recognized by search engines through interconnected, high-quality content.
V
Vector Embeddings
Vector embeddings are numerical representations that transform unstructured data into arrays of floating-point numbers in high-dimensional space, where semantic similarity is preserved as geometric proximity.
X
XML Sitemap
An XML Sitemap is a structured file that lists a website's URLs and metadata to help search engines discover, crawl, and index web pages more efficiently.