Reference

The SEO, GEO and AI glossary

Every term we use in an audit, defined the way we apply it — with why it matters and what to do about it. 20 entries and growing.

SEO

Core Web Vitals
Google's field metrics for loading, interactivity and visual stability.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
Time until the largest visible element in the viewport has rendered.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
A score for how much visible content moves unexpectedly during load.
Entity SEO
Optimising for the things a search engine understands, not just strings.
Schema markup (JSON-LD)
Structured data that states explicitly what a page is about.
Programmatic SEO
Generating many pages from one template and a structured dataset.
Long-tail keyword
A specific, lower-volume query with clearer intent.
Search intent
The goal behind a query: informational, commercial, navigational or transactional.
Zero-click search
A search resolved on the results page without any onward click.
Crawl budget
The number of URLs a crawler will fetch from a site in a given period.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
Optimising content so AI assistants cite it inside generated answers.
llms.txt
A root-level file that tells language models which content to prioritise.
Answer engine
A system that returns a synthesised answer instead of a list of links.

Quality Score
Google Ads' 1–10 diagnostic of ad, keyword and landing page relevance.
Return on ad spend (ROAS)
Revenue generated per unit of media spend.
Conversion tracking
Recording the actions that follow a click so platforms can optimise to them.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
Grounding a model's answer in documents retrieved at query time.
AI evaluation harness
A repeatable test suite that scores model outputs against fixed cases.

Prompt injection
Untrusted content that manipulates a model's instructions.
Web application firewall (WAF)
A filter that inspects HTTP traffic and blocks malicious requests.