Terms thrown into proposals without explanation. Here is exactly what they mean, and why they matter to you.
- SEO
- Search engine optimisation: everything that makes your site crawlable, understood, and ranked so it appears to people searching for your service.
- AEO
- Answer engine optimisation: shaping your pages to be the extracted answer in search results and voice assistants.
- GEO
- Generative engine optimisation: getting your brand named inside answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews.
- LLMO
- Another name circling the same idea: preparing content for large language models to read and cite.
- E-E-A-T
- Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust: the criteria Google uses to judge whether content deserves belief.
- Core Web Vitals
- Page experience measurements: how fast the largest element paints, how quickly interaction responds, and how stable the layout stays.
- Structured data
- Hidden markup telling machines what each element on your page is: product, price, question, business, article.
- Crawl budget
- How many of your pages Google crawls in a period. Spend it on filter pages and your earning pages go unvisited.
- Featured snippet
- The box above the results carrying an answer extracted from a single page. The highest position on the page.
- AI Overviews
- Google’s generated summary above the results, citing a limited number of sources and taking the clicks from the rest.
- Backlink
- A link to you from another site. A vote of trust Google reads, and its value comes from the source, not the count.
- Map pack
- The three results shown with the map in local search. Getting in means real calls and real visits.
- Search intent
- What the searcher actually wants: to learn, to compare, or to buy now. A page that misreads the intent never converts.
- hreflang
- A tag telling search engines this page is a language version of that one, so the two never compete or count as duplicates.