Glossary
The words of the trade, without the jargon
Search loves its acronyms. Here are 14 of them in plain English, with the usual trap where there is one.
GEO
Generative Engine Optimization
- Everything that increases your chances of being cited in an answer written by an AI — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, or Google’s AI Overview.
- Nothing to do with geolocation, despite the prefix. That is the most common confusion around this term.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization
- Classic organic search optimisation: earning a good position in Google’s list of blue links without paying for the slot.
AI Overview
- The block of written answer Google displays above the classic results. Being cited there is often worth more than a first organic position, because it occupies the top of the screen.
- It does not appear on every search, and not for everyone at the same time. Google is rolling it out gradually.
llms.txt
- A text file placed at the root of the site that summarises, in plain language, what the company does and where to find the important information. It helps a language model understand the site without having to read all of it.
- It is a convention proposed by the community, not a standard adopted by the engines. It costs little to put in place; we do not promise it is decisive.
schema.org
- A markup vocabulary that lets you declare explicitly, in the page code, that a piece of text is a price, an opening time, a review or a frequently asked question.
- This is what turns a sentence into usable data. Without it an AI has to guess; with it, it knows.
Crawl
- The visit of a robot that goes through your pages to read their content. Googlebot does it for Google, GPTBot for OpenAI, ClaudeBot for Anthropic, PerplexityBot for Perplexity.
- An over-restrictive robots.txt can block AI robots without you ever intending it. It is one of the first things our audit checks.
Citation
- The fact that an AI mentions your company or your site in its answer, with or without a link. It is the unit of measurement of GEO, the way position is the unit of SEO.
Variance
- The gap between several answers to the same question. A language model is not deterministic: ask the same question three times and you may get three different answers.
- That is why we run every measurement several times. A citation obtained one time out of three is not a secured position, and displaying it as one would be lying.
Position
- The rank of your page in Google’s list of results for a given search.
- It depends on the place, the device, the language and the visitor’s history. A position never exists in the absolute — always “from where, when, on which device”.
Long-tail keyword
- A precise, low-frequency search — “insurance-approved locksmith Lausanne Sunday” rather than “locksmith”.
- Little volume, but little competition and an intent far closer to a purchase. This is the ground on which a small business can win.
Backlink
- A link pointing to your site from another site. Long the dominant SEO criterion, it still counts, but less on its own than before.
E-E-A-T
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness
- The grid Google uses to assess the credibility of a source: lived experience, expertise, authority and reliability.
- In practice: say who is writing, with what qualifications, and on what date. A signed and dated page is worth more than an anonymous one.
Structured data
- The generic term for any information marked up in a machine-readable way, most often in JSON-LD following the schema.org vocabulary.
Core Web Vitals
- Google’s three measurements of the real experience: how fast the main content appears, responsiveness to clicks, and visual stability of the page while it loads.
- They weigh less than content, but a slow site loses visitors before it even loses positions.
A term missing?
Write to us and we will add it. This glossary exists so that you can read any search-optimisation quote without having to take anyone’s word for it.