Reference

The SEO & GEO glossary

Search has a jargon problem. Here’s what the terms actually mean, in plain language, without the mystique.

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization): Optimizing content for systems that answer questions directly — featured snippets, voice assistants, and AI answer engines. In practice: concise, factual, well-structured answers on pages with clear authority signals.
Canonical URL: The URL you declare as the authoritative version of a page when several URLs could show similar content. Prevents duplicate-content dilution by consolidating signals onto one address.
Core Web Vitals: Google’s user-experience metrics for loading (LCP), interactivity (INP), and visual stability (CLS). Poor scores can hold back otherwise strong pages.
Crawlability: How easily search engine bots can discover and read your pages. Determined by internal links, sitemaps, robots directives, response codes, and site performance.
Doorway page: A page created to rank for a query and funnel visitors elsewhere, offering little value itself. Violates search engine guidelines; the failure mode responsible programmatic SEO must avoid.
E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness — the qualities Google’s quality rater guidelines use to evaluate content credibility, especially for topics affecting money or health.
Entity: A distinct thing — a company, product, person, or concept — that search systems recognize and connect. Clear entity definitions help machines understand what your content is actually about.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): Structuring content so generative AI search systems can understand, extract, and attribute it. Builds on SEO fundamentals with extra weight on semantic structure, entity clarity, and factual precision.
hreflang: An HTML attribute telling search engines which language and regional versions of a page exist, so users get the right one.
Information architecture: How a site’s content is organized: hierarchy, URL structure, navigation, and the relationships between pages. The single most expensive thing to get wrong, because fixing it later means migrations.
Internal linking: Links between pages of the same site. They distribute authority, define topical relationships, and determine whether crawlers (and users) can find your pages at all.
Programmatic SEO: Generating many pages from structured data and templates — one per city, integration, or comparison. Works when each page carries genuinely unique value; fails as spam when it doesn’t.
Search intent: What a searcher actually wants when typing a query — to learn, to compare, to buy, to find a specific site. Pages that satisfy the full intent outrank pages that merely contain the keyword.
Structured data (Schema.org): Machine-readable markup describing what a page contains — an article, a product, an FAQ. Helps search engines interpret content and can enable rich results. Must match the visible content.
Thin content: Pages with too little unique value to justify existing: near-duplicates, boilerplate variations, auto-generated filler. A liability that can drag down a whole site’s credibility.
Topic cluster: A pillar page covering a subject broadly, supported by focused articles covering subtopics in depth, all interlinked. The architecture through which sites build topical authority.

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