AEO Glossary

Expert definitions, real-world examples, and practical insights for SEO professionals, marketers, and business owners working with AI-powered search optimization.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

The percentage of users who click on a link after seeing it in search results, AI responses, or other digital placements—a key metric for measuring content visibility and relevance.

Analytics Updated 10/13/2025

Content Authority

The perceived expertise, trustworthiness, and credibility of content and its creator, which influences how AI systems prioritize and cite sources in generated responses.

Answer Engine Optimization Updated 10/9/2025

Content Freshness

The recency and up-to-date nature of web content, a ranking signal used by both traditional search engines and AI systems to determine information relevance and accuracy.

SEO Updated 11/17/2025

Conversion Rate

The percentage of visitors who complete a desired action on your website, such as making a purchase, signing up for a service, or downloading a resource—the ultimate measure of content effectiveness.

Analytics Updated 10/13/2025

Crawlability

The ease with which search engines and AI systems can discover, access, and navigate through a website's pages to index content for search results and data retrieval.

SEO Updated 12/19/2025

Domain Authority

A predictive metric (developed by Moz) that estimates how well a website will rank in search results, based on backlink profile quality, age, and other factors—also used as a trust signal by AI systems.

SEO Updated 12/19/2025

E-E-A-T

Google's quality framework standing for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness—criteria used to evaluate content quality that increasingly influences both traditional search rankings and AI citation decisions.

SEO Updated 11/17/2025

Engagement Metrics

Quantitative measures of how users interact with website content, including time on page, bounce rate, and pages per session—indicators of content quality that influence both SEO rankings and AI trust signals.

Analytics Updated 11/29/2025

Entity Recognition

The AI process of identifying and classifying named entities (people, organizations, locations, products, concepts) within text to understand context, relationships, and semantic meaning.

AI Updated 12/15/2025

Featured Snippet

A highlighted search result that appears at the top of Google's search results, displaying a direct answer extracted from a webpage along with the page title, URL, and sometimes an image.

SEO Updated 12/15/2025

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

The practice of optimizing digital content to improve visibility and ranking within AI-powered generative search engines like Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and ChatGPT.