Glossary
#
- 301 redirect
- A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect: the server responds with status code 301 (Moved Permanently) and sends visitors and search engines to a new address. Google treats it as a strong signal that the new URL should become the canonical.
- 404 and 410
- 404 (Not Found) and 410 (Gone) are HTTP status codes reporting that a page does not exist. A 410 adds that the page is gone for good; Google treats both codes the same way and removes such URLs from its index over time.
A
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) is answering specific customer questions clearly on your website, so search engines and AI assistants can show or use that answer. There is no official definition; Outseen uses it to mean: for each question, the answer first, in a form that suits the question.
- AI assistant
- An AI assistant is a service where you ask a question in plain language and get an answer written by a language model, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot or Perplexity. Many AI assistants can also search the web live and then link to sources.
- AI crawler
- An AI crawler is a bot from an AI provider that fetches web pages, for example to train language models, to fill a search index for an AI assistant or to retrieve a page because a user asked for it. Each provider has its own bots, each with its own name and purpose.
- AI mention
- An AI mention is any time an AI assistant or AI search feature names your business, brand, product or website in an answer, with or without a link. A reference that links to your page as a source is called a citation.
- AI Mode
- AI Mode is the AI search experience in Google Search where you ask a question, get a generated answer with links to websites and can ask follow-up questions. Google intends it for questions where you want to explore, reason or compare.
- AI Overviews
- AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries at the top of Google’s search results, with links to web pages that support the answer. Google only shows them when its systems judge that such a summary adds something to the regular results.
- Alt text
- Alt text is the text description of an image in the alt attribute of the img element. Screen readers read that text aloud, and search engines use it to understand what the image shows.
- Anchor text
- Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a link. That text tells visitors and search engines what they can expect on the linked page.
- Atlas
- Atlas is Outseen’s own research engine for SEO and GEO. Atlas investigates the public code and technical signals a website returns and records, for every finding, what was found, in which source, on which URL and when.
B
- Backlink
- A backlink is a link on another website that points to your website. Google names the fact that other prominent websites link to or refer to content as one of the factors it uses to assess quality.
- Bing Webmaster Tools
- Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft’s service in which website owners see how Bing processes their site. Since February 2026 it has included the AI Performance report as a public preview, showing citations of your site in Microsoft Copilot and AI-generated summaries in Bing.
- Bingbot
- Bingbot is Microsoft Bing’s standard crawler, which handles most of Bing’s daily crawling. Bingbot uses several user agent strings and renders pages with a recent stable version of Microsoft Edge.
- Breadcrumb
- A breadcrumb is a row of links that shows where a page sits in the structure of a website, for example Home > Bikes > City bikes. With BreadcrumbList schema you also describe that row for search engines.
C
- Canonical URL
- A canonical URL is the address a search engine picks as the representative version of a page that exists at several URLs. With rel="canonical" you indicate which version you prefer; Google treats that as a strong signal, not a binding rule.
- Citation
- A citation is a reference in an AI answer to the web page a claim is based on, usually as a clickable link next to the text or in a list of sources. Citations appear mainly when an AI assistant searches the web live.
- ClaudeBot and Claude-SearchBot
- ClaudeBot and Claude-SearchBot are crawlers from Anthropic. ClaudeBot collects web content that may contribute to training Anthropic’s AI models; Claude-SearchBot crawls the web to improve the quality of search results for Claude users.
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Click-through rate (CTR) is the share of impressions that lead to a click: the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions. Google Search Console shows CTR per query and per page.
- CMS (content management system)
- A CMS (content management system) is software you use to create, edit and publish the content of a website without writing code yourself. Well-known examples are WordPress and, for online shops, Shopify and WooCommerce.
- Content page
- A content page, as Outseen uses the term, is a new or thoroughly reworked page with its own purpose and useful content. A one-off change to a title or a short description does not count as a full content page.
- Core update
- A core update is a significant, broad change to Google’s search algorithms and systems. Google runs several a year to show helpful and reliable results; a core update does not target specific websites.
- Core Web Vitals
- Core Web Vitals are three metrics Google uses to assess the user experience of a page: Largest Contentful Paint (loading), Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness to input) and Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability).
- Crawl budget
- Crawl budget is the amount of crawling Google spends on a website. It depends on how much the server can handle without being overloaded and on how much Google wants to crawl the content.
- Crawler
- A crawler (also called a robot, bot or spider) is a program that automatically discovers websites and fetches pages, for example by following links. Search engines and AI providers use crawlers to fill their index or training data.
- Crawling
- Crawling is the automatic fetching of web pages by a crawler, which finds new URLs through links and sitemaps along the way. It is the first step before a search engine can index and show a page.
D
- Duplicate content
- Duplicate content is content that appears at more than one URL, or is so similar that a search engine treats the pages as the same. According to Google, some duplicate content is normal and does not violate its spam policies.
E
- E-E-A-T
- E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. Google uses the term to describe the qualities that helpful, reliable content shows, and of the four it treats trust as the most important.
- Entity
- An entity is a unique, recognisable thing or concept, such as a business, person, place or product, that a search engine can identify regardless of the exact words used to describe it. Google records entities and the relationships between them in its Knowledge Graph.
- European Accessibility Act (EAA)
- The European Accessibility Act (EAA) is Directive (EU) 2019/882, which sets accessibility requirements for products and services, including online shops that sell to consumers.
F
- Faceted navigation
- Faceted navigation is a way of filtering or sorting a listing of products or articles by attributes such as colour, size or price. If every filter combination gets its own URL, the number of addresses can grow without limit.
- FAQPage schema
- FAQPage schema is structured data of the Schema.org type FAQPage: a web page with one or more frequently asked questions and their answers. The type remains valid, but Google has not shown the related FAQ rich result since 7 May 2026.
- Featured snippet
- A featured snippet is a highlighted search result in Google where the text snippet comes first and the link to the source page follows. Google decides whether and which page appears as a featured snippet; you cannot submit or mark a page for it.
G
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is work on how visible a business and its information are in the answers of AI assistants and AI search features. You make pages technically readable, answer customer questions clearly and keep your business details the same everywhere.
- Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
- Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the current version of Google Analytics. It measures how websites and apps are used on the basis of events, such as a page view or a click, and replaced Universal Analytics, whose standard properties stopped processing data on 1 July 2023.
- Google Business Profile
- A Google Business Profile is the listing of a business in Google Search, Google Maps and other Google services, showing details such as its address or service area, opening hours, contact details and photos. You manage the profile yourself once you have claimed and verified it.
- Google Search Console
- Google Search Console is a free service from Google that helps you monitor and improve how your website appears in Google Search. It shows, among other things, which pages are indexed, which queries you appear for and which technical problems Google finds.
- Google-Extended
- Google-Extended is a robots.txt token that lets you decide whether content Google crawls from your site may be used to train future Gemini models and for grounding in products such as the Gemini apps. It has no effect on inclusion or ranking in Google Search.
- Googlebot
- Googlebot is the collective name for Google Search’s two web crawlers: Googlebot Smartphone and Googlebot Desktop. Googlebot fetches pages so Google can process them for its search results, including AI Overviews and AI Mode.
- GPTBot
- GPTBot is OpenAI’s crawler that collects web content that may be used to train OpenAI’s generative AI foundation models. Blocking GPTBot in robots.txt signals that your content should not be used for that training.
- Grounding
- Grounding is anchoring an AI answer in external sources, such as current search results, instead of only in what the language model knows from training. A grounded answer can point to those sources.
H
- Hallucination
- A hallucination is a statement from a language model that sounds convincing but is not true, such as an invented fact, figure, source or product feature. AI assistants that search live can hallucinate too.
- Headings (H1 to H6)
- Headings are the HTML elements h1 to h6 that mark the titles of a page and its sections, from most important (h1) to least important (h6). They make the structure of a page clear to visitors, assistive software and search engines.
- Hreflang
- Hreflang is an annotation that tells search engines which pages are language or regional versions of the same content, so they can show each searcher the most suitable version.
- HTTP status code
- An HTTP status code is a three-digit number a web server uses to report how it handled a request, such as 200 (success), 301 (moved permanently), 404 (not found) or 503 (temporarily unavailable).
- HTTPS
- HTTPS is the secure form of HTTP, the protocol browsers and websites use to exchange data. Traffic is encrypted with a TLS certificate, so others cannot read or alter it along the way.
I
- Impression
- An impression is a single display of a link to your website in Google Search, Discover or News. Search Console counts an impression when a user saw the link or may have seen it.
- Indexing
- Indexing is the step in which a search engine analyses a fetched page and stores the information in its index, the database search results come from. Only indexed pages can appear in search results, including AI Overviews and AI Mode.
- IndexNow
- IndexNow is a protocol that lets a website tell search engines straight away that a URL has been added, updated or deleted. A notification sent to one participating search engine is shared with the other participants.
- Internal link
- An internal link is a link from one page to another page on the same website. Internal links help visitors move on and let search engines find pages and understand how they relate.
J
- JSON-LD
- JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) is a W3C standard for expressing linked data in JSON. On websites it is the most widely used format for structured data: a separate script block that describes the content of the page.
K
- Keyword
- A keyword is a word or phrase people type into a search engine to find something. In SEO, you research which keywords your customers use, so your pages cover those words and the question behind them.
- Knowledge cutoff
- The knowledge cutoff is the point in time up to which a language model’s training data runs. The model does not know about anything that happened later on its own; only when the AI assistant searches live can it use newer information.
- Knowledge Graph
- The Knowledge Graph is Google’s knowledge base with millions of entries about real entities, such as people, places, organisations and things, and the relationships between them. Google introduced it in May 2012.
L
- Large language model (LLM)
- A large language model (LLM) is a computer model that produces text by repeatedly predicting which piece of text is likely to come next. Large language models are trained on very large amounts of text and form the core of AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude.
- Link building
- Link building is the work of getting other websites to link to your website. Within Google’s rules, it is about links you earn with useful content and genuine collaboration; buying or swapping links to influence rankings counts as link spam.
- LLMO
- LLMO (Large Language Model Optimisation) is an umbrella term for work on how visible a business is in the answers of language models and AI assistants. The term has no fixed definition and is largely used interchangeably with GEO.
- llms.txt
- llms.txt is a proposed text file in Markdown, usually placed at the root of a website, that gives AI systems a short summary and a list of the site’s most important pages. It is a proposal from 2024, not an official standard.
- Local SEO
- Local SEO is improving your visibility for searches with local intent, such as ‘bike repair Zwolle’ or ‘hairdresser near me’. It revolves around your Google Business Profile, your website and consistent business details.
- Long-tail keyword
- A long-tail keyword is a longer, specific search that is rarely searched on its own but contains a clear question or wish, such as ‘waterproof walking boot for wide feet’.
M
- Meta description
- A meta description is a short summary of a page in a meta element in the HTML. Google can use that text as the snippet in search results, but mostly creates snippets from the content of the page itself.
- Meta robots tag
- The meta robots tag is an HTML element in the head of a page that gives search engines instructions about that one page, such as not indexing it (noindex), not following its links (nofollow) or not showing a text snippet (nosnippet).
- Mobile-first indexing
- Mobile-first indexing means that Google uses the mobile version of a website, fetched with its smartphone crawler, to index and rank pages.
N
- NAP consistency
- NAP consistency means keeping a business’s name, address and phone number (NAP) exactly the same everywhere they appear: on its website, in its Google Business Profile, in structured data and in listings elsewhere.
- Noindex
- Noindex is an instruction that asks search engines not to include a page in their search results. You place it in a meta robots tag in the HTML or in the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header.
O
- OAI-SearchBot
- OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI’s search bot that fetches websites so they can be shown and linked in ChatGPT’s search features. If you block OAI-SearchBot, your site will not appear in ChatGPT’s search answers, although it can still appear as a navigational link.
- Organization schema
- Organization schema is structured data of the Schema.org type Organization, used to record your business details, such as name, website, logo, address, contact details and links to your profiles elsewhere.
- Orphan page
- An orphan page is a page on your website that no internal link points to. Visitors and crawlers can only find it through a sitemap, an external link or by typing the address directly.
P
- People also ask
- People also ask is a block in Google’s search results with questions related to the search. When you expand a question, Google shows a short answer from a web page with a link to that page.
- PerplexityBot
- PerplexityBot is Perplexity’s crawler that fetches websites to show and link them in Perplexity’s search results. According to Perplexity, PerplexityBot is not used to collect content for training AI foundation models.
- Product schema
- Product schema is structured data of the Schema.org type Product, used to describe a product with details such as its name, price, currency and stock status. Google uses it for product displays in search results.
- Prompt
- A prompt is the input you give a language model or AI assistant: the question or instruction, possibly with context, examples and instructions about the form of the answer. When measuring AI visibility, the prompt is the fixed customer question you ask again and again.
Q
- Query fan-out
- Query fan-out is a technique where an AI search feature splits one question into several related searches about subtopics, runs them at the same time and combines the results into one answer. Google uses the technique in AI Overviews and AI Mode.
R
- Recheck
- A recheck is a new measurement by Atlas, the research engine developed by Outseen, after a website has been changed. Atlas runs the same check again and records whether the technical issue found earlier was resolved at the time of that measurement.
- Rendering
- Rendering is running a page’s HTML, CSS and JavaScript to produce the final content a visitor sees. Google renders pages with a recent version of Chromium; not every bot can run JavaScript.
- Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
- Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a method where an AI system first looks up relevant documents and a language model then writes an answer based on the text it found. This lets the answer include current information and sources that were not in the training data.
- Rich results
- Rich results are search results in Google with extra visual or interactive elements, such as review stars, prices or recipe details, that Google can show based on structured data. Structured data makes a page eligible, but Google does not guarantee that a rich result appears.
- robots.txt
- robots.txt is a text file in the root of a website that tells crawlers which parts of the site they may or may not fetch. It controls crawling, not indexing: a blocked URL can still appear in Google.
S
- Scaled content abuse
- Scaled content abuse is producing large numbers of pages with the main purpose of manipulating search rankings, usually with little original or useful content. Google counts it as spam, whether the pages were made by people, by AI or by both.
- Schema.org
- Schema.org is a shared vocabulary for structured data, founded by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex. It defines how to describe things such as a product, an organisation or a breadcrumb trail, so search engines read the same language.
- Search engine
- A search engine is a service that automatically discovers web pages, stores them in an index and shows the best matching results for a search. Well-known search engines are Google and Bing.
- Search intent
- Search intent is the goal behind a search: what someone actually wants to know, find, compare or buy. A page that matches that intent fits what the searcher needs and what a search engine is looking for.
- SEO (search engine optimisation)
- SEO (search engine optimisation) is the work on a website that lets search engines find, understand and show its pages for searches that match what the business offers. It covers technical accessibility, clear content and references from other websites.
- SEO and GEO audit
- An SEO and GEO audit is an investigation into how visible a website is in search engines and AI answers. At Outseen we investigate the agreed pages and topics, assess technology, content and structure, and turn the findings into a plan with priorities.
- SERP (search engine results page)
- A SERP (search engine results page) is the page of results a search engine shows after a search. Besides regular text results, a SERP can include rich results, images, videos, related questions and AI answers.
- Server-side rendering
- Server-side rendering (SSR) means the server builds the complete HTML of a page and sends it to the browser, instead of letting the browser build the page with JavaScript. The content is therefore already in the HTML a crawler receives.
- Share of voice
- Share of voice is the share a brand has of all mentions within a defined set, for example the share of AI answers to fixed customer questions in which your business is named, compared with other providers.
- Shopify
- Shopify is an ecommerce platform you use to set up an online shop, manage products and handle payments. Among other things, Shopify generates a sitemap.xml automatically; titles, descriptions and alt text you fill in yourself.
- Structured data
- Structured data is a standardised description of the content of a page, for example that it concerns a product with a particular price. Search engines read that description directly, and it can make a page eligible for rich results, with no guarantee of an extra display.
T
- Technical finding
- A technical finding is the recorded outcome of a check by Atlas, the research engine developed by Outseen. Every finding states what was found, in which source, on which URL and when; if information for a conclusion is missing, that stays visible.
- Title tag
- The title tag is the HTML element <title> in the head of a page, holding that page’s title. Google uses it, among other things, to create the clickable title in search results, but can also choose other text from the page for that.
U
- User agent
- A user agent is the software that makes a web request on someone’s behalf, such as a browser or a crawler. Through the HTTP header User-Agent, that software introduces itself to the server, for example as Googlebot or GPTBot.
- UTM parameter
- A UTM parameter is an addition to a URL, such as utm_source=newsletter, that shows in Google Analytics which source, medium and campaign a visitor came from.
W
- WCAG
- WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) is the W3C’s technical standard describing how to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities. The latest version is WCAG 2.2, with testable success criteria at three levels: A, AA and AAA.
- Website check (Quickscan)
- The website check (Quickscan) from Outseen is a free first technical impression of a website, followed by a short AI result. Atlas investigates your homepage and at most two other pages; then Outseen asks ChatGPT and Gemini six questions. Both results arrive by email.
- Website migration
- A website migration is a major change in which the addresses of your website change, for example through a new domain, the switch from http to https, a new URL structure or a different platform. Without a redirect plan, your search visibility can drop temporarily or for good.
- WooCommerce
- WooCommerce is an open-source ecommerce platform for WordPress. You install it as a plugin on your own WordPress website and use it to manage products, orders and payments.
X
- X-Robots-Tag
- X-Robots-Tag is an HTTP header that lets a server send the same instructions as a meta robots tag, such as noindex or nofollow. It also works for files without HTML, such as PDFs and images.
- XML sitemap
- An XML sitemap is a file in which you list the pages and other files of your website for search engines, optionally with the date each was last changed. It helps search engines find URLs, but does not guarantee they will be crawled or indexed.
Y
- YMYL
- YMYL stands for Your Money or Your Life. Google uses the term for topics that could significantly affect a person’s health, financial stability or safety, or the welfare of society.
Z
- Zero-click search
- A zero-click search is a search where someone gets the answer directly on the results page or in an AI answer and does not click any result. The question is answered without a visit to a website.