AI search and SEO glossary

Short, plain-English definitions of the terms you'll meet in AI search, SEO and the AI Rank Lab dashboard. Each term links to the lessons that teach it.

A

AEO (answer engine optimization): AEO is the work of making your pages the source that answer engines (AI assistants and Google's AI answers) quote when they answer a question directly.
AI crawler: An AI crawler is a bot run by an AI company that fetches web pages, for model training, for an AI search index, or because a user asked the assistant to read a page.
AI Mode: AI Mode is a conversational search experience in Google Search that answers a question with an AI-written response and links, and lets you ask follow-ups.
AI Overview: An AI Overview is the AI-generated summary Google shows at the top of some search results, with links to the pages it drew on.
AI-referred traffic: AI-referred traffic is people who arrive on your site by clicking a link in an AI answer, from assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity or Copilot.
Anchor text: Anchor text is the clickable text of a link. It tells readers and search engines what the linked page is about.
API key: An API key is the credential that lets your own scripts, the MCP server and the WordPress plugin act on your AI Rank Lab account. It comes as a key plus a secret.

B

Backlink: A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Search engines treat relevant links from trusted sites as a sign of authority.
Brand memory: Brand memory is the profile of your brand (exact name, voice, audience and key facts) that AI Rank Lab's content writer uses so articles describe you correctly.

C

Canonical URL: A canonical URL is the version of a page you want search engines to treat as the main one when the same content is available at several URLs.
Citation: A citation is a link or source reference an AI engine attaches to its answer, showing which page it took information from.
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): CLS measures how much visible content unexpectedly moves while a page is in use. Good is 0.1 or less.
Content decay: Content decay is a steady loss of clicks and impressions on a page that used to perform well, usually because it went out of date or competitors published something better.
Core Web Vitals: Core Web Vitals are Google's three user-experience metrics for loading (LCP), responsiveness (INP) and visual stability (CLS), measured on real visits.
Credits: Credits are AI Rank Lab's single currency: one balance pays for every paid action, such as audits, prompt runs, articles and API calls, while reading results you already have is free.
CTR (click-through rate): Click-through rate is clicks divided by impressions: the share of people who saw your result and clicked it.

E

E-E-A-T: E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness: the qualities Google's search quality raters look for in content and its creators.
Entity: An entity is a distinct, identifiable thing, such as a company, product, person or place, that search engines and AI models can recognise and describe.

F

FAQ schema (FAQPage): FAQ schema is FAQPage structured data that marks up a list of questions and their answers on a page.

G

GEO (generative engine optimization): GEO is the work of getting your brand mentioned, recommended and cited in answers written by generative AI such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity.
GPTBot: GPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler for training its generative AI foundation models. Blocking it in robots.txt signals that your content should not be used for training.

I

Impressions: In Google Search Console, an impression is counted when a link to your site appears in a search result a user sees.
INP (Interaction to Next Paint): INP measures how quickly a page responds visually to clicks, taps and key presses across a visit. Good is 200 milliseconds or less.
Internal link: An internal link is a link from one page on your site to another page on the same site.

J

JSON-LD: JSON-LD is the most common format for structured data: a `<script type="application/ld+json">` block that describes a page's facts separately from its visible HTML.

K

Keyword cannibalisation: Keyword cannibalisation is when several pages on your own site compete for the same search query, so none of them performs as well as one strong page would.
Keyword difficulty: Keyword difficulty is an estimated score, usually 0 to 100, of how hard it would be to rank in the top results for a keyword.

L

LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): LCP measures how long it takes for the largest image or text block in the viewport to appear. Good is 2.5 seconds or less.
LLM (large language model): A large language model is an AI model trained on very large amounts of text to predict and generate language. GPT, Claude and Gemini are LLM families.
llms.txt: llms.txt is a proposed Markdown file at the root of a website (/llms.txt) that gives AI tools a short summary of the site and a list of its key pages.

M

MCP (Model Context Protocol): MCP is an open protocol that lets AI assistants such as Claude call external tools and data sources. AI Rank Lab runs an MCP server so you can use its tools from an assistant.
Mention: A mention is your brand's name appearing in the text of an AI answer, whether or not the answer links to your site.

P

Prompt: In AI Rank Lab, a prompt is a question you track, phrased the way a buyer would ask an AI assistant, such as "best CRM for small agencies".

Q

Query fan-out: Query fan-out is when an AI search system turns one question into several narrower searches, retrieves results for each and combines them into one answer.

R

Referring domain: A referring domain is a distinct website that links to yours. Ten links from one site count as ten backlinks but one referring domain.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG): Retrieval-augmented generation is a method where an AI model first retrieves relevant documents, then writes its answer using them, often citing them as sources.
robots.txt: robots.txt is a text file at the root of your site that tells crawlers which paths they may or may not fetch, rule by rule for each user agent.

S

Search volume: Search volume is the estimated average number of times a keyword is searched per month, usually for one country and language.
Sentiment: Sentiment is the tone in which an AI answer describes your brand: positive, neutral or negative.
SEO (search engine optimization): SEO is the work of helping search engines crawl, understand and rank your pages so that people searching for what you offer find and click them.
SERP (search engine results page): A SERP is the page a search engine shows for a query: organic results plus features such as AI Overviews, ads, maps, videos and "People also ask".
Share of voice: Share of voice is your brand's mentions as a percentage of all brand mentions (yours plus your competitors') across the same set of questions and engines.
Structured data: Structured data is code on a page that states facts in a standard vocabulary (schema.org), so machines can read details like a product's price or an article's author without guessing.

T

Tracking tag: The tracking tag is the small JavaScript snippet you add to your site so AI Rank Lab can record AI-referred visitors and AI agents that load your pages in a browser.

W

Webhook: A webhook is an HTTP request one system sends to another when something happens. AI Rank Lab uses one to deliver a finished article to your website when you publish.

X

XML sitemap: An XML sitemap is a file that lists the URLs on your site you want search engines to discover and crawl, optionally with the date each was last changed.