SEO & AI search glossary: SEO and AI search, defined.
Short, plain-English definitions of the terms founders run into when they start on SEO, backlinks and AI search, each linked to the guide that goes deeper.
AI search
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of making a brand, product or page more likely to be retrieved, cited and recommended in answers written by AI systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so search engines and AI assistants can use it directly as the answer to a question, in places such as featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, voice assistants and AI-generated answers.
llms.txt
llms.txt is a proposed standard for a Markdown file at a website's root (/llms.txt) that gives large language models a short, curated summary of the site and links to its most useful pages.
Google AI Overviews
Google AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that Google shows at the top of some search results, answering the query in a short passage with links to the web pages that support it.
Backlinks
Domain Rating (DR)
Domain Rating (DR) is a score from 0 to 100, created by the SEO tool Ahrefs, that rates the strength of a website's backlink profile compared with other sites in the Ahrefs database.
Dofollow link
A dofollow link is an ordinary HTML link with no rel attribute value that tells search engines to treat it differently, so it can pass ranking signals to the page it points to.
Link velocity
Link velocity is the rate at which a website or page gains or loses backlinks over a period of time, usually measured as new referring domains per month.
Contextual backlink
A contextual backlink is a link placed inside the main body text of a relevant article, surrounded by content about the same topic as the page it points to.
Guest post
A guest post is an article written by someone outside a publication and published on that site under the guest's name, usually with a short author bio and one or more links back to the writer's own site.
Content
Topical authority
Topical authority is the degree to which a website is seen as a reliable, thorough source on a specific subject, built by covering that subject in depth, linking related pages together and earning links and mentions from other sites in the same field.
Programmatic SEO
Programmatic SEO is the practice of generating many search-targeted pages from a template and a structured dataset, so each page answers a specific long-tail query such as "[app] integration with [app]" or "[currency] to [currency] converter".
Parasite SEO
Parasite SEO is the tactic of publishing content on a high-authority third-party website so that it ranks on the strength of the host site's reputation rather than its own merit.
E-E-A-T
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, the framework Google uses in its search quality rater guidelines to judge whether content and its creators are credible, with trust as the most important part.
Technical SEO
Indexing
Indexing is the step in which a search engine analyzes a page it has crawled and stores it in its index, the database it draws search results from.
Crawl budget
Crawl budget is the set of URLs on a site that Google can and wants to crawl in a given period, determined by Google's crawl capacity limit for the site and its crawl demand.
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