Marketing glossary

AEO,SXOandthelanguageof searchin2026

Search stopped being a list of ten blue links. These are the terms that actually decide whether a local business gets found now — defined in plain English, without the agency fog.

Three things changed at once: an AI now answers the question before anyone clicks, the click that does happen is judged far more harshly, and the machine reading your website is not a person. Most of the vocabulary below exists because of those three shifts.

If you only read three entries, read AEO, SXO and zero-click search. Between them they explain most of what changed.

AI & answer engines

How search behaves now that a model answers the question before a link is ever clicked.

Answer Engine OptimizationAEO

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so that AI answer engines — Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot — quote it directly when answering a user's question.

Classic SEO competes for a blue link. AEO competes for the answer itself. That changes what a good page looks like: a direct, self-contained answer in the first two sentences, clear question-shaped headings, real specifics an engine can attribute, and structured data that tells the machine what it is reading. A page can rank #3 organically and still be the one the AI quotes — or rank #1 and get skipped entirely.

Generative Engine OptimizationGEO

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the broader discipline of earning visibility inside AI-generated answers, covering both what a model cites and what it says about your brand unprompted.

GEO and AEO overlap heavily and are often used interchangeably. The useful distinction: AEO is about winning a citation on a specific question, GEO is about the model's overall picture of you — the mentions, reviews, directory entries and third-party coverage it absorbed during training and retrieval. You influence GEO largely off your own website.

AI Overviews

AI Overviews are Google's AI-generated summaries that appear above the traditional results and answer a query directly, citing a handful of sources.

Formerly Search Generative Experience (SGE). When one appears, the classic #1 organic result loses a large share of its clicks — so the strategic question shifts from "can we rank first" to "are we one of the cited sources." Local service queries increasingly trigger them, which is why this matters to a plumber as much as to a SaaS company.

Answer engine

An answer engine is any search interface that returns a synthesised answer rather than a ranked list of links.

ChatGPT with browsing, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Bing Copilot and Claude all qualify. They share a habit worth designing for: they retrieve a small number of sources, extract the passage that most directly answers the question, and attribute it. Being retrievable and being extractable are two different problems.

Large Language ModelLLM

A Large Language Model (LLM) is an AI system trained on very large amounts of text that generates responses by predicting likely continuations.

For marketing purposes the operative facts are: it has a training cutoff, it can be wrong with total confidence, and when connected to search it will retrieve live pages to ground its answer. That last behaviour is the one you can influence this quarter.

Retrieval-Augmented GenerationRAG

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is the technique of fetching relevant documents at question time and feeding them to a language model so its answer is grounded in real sources.

This is the mechanism behind almost every AI citation you care about. It also explains why fresh, crawlable, well-structured pages punch above their weight: the retrieval step happens live, so a page published last week can be cited even though it post-dates the model's training.

llms.txt

llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file at a site's root that gives AI crawlers a curated, markdown-formatted map of the content a publisher most wants understood.

Think robots.txt for meaning rather than permission. Adoption is still voluntary and uneven, so treat it as cheap insurance rather than a ranking factor — the returns today come mostly from the clarity exercise it forces on your own content.

Brand mention

A brand mention is any reference to your business on a third-party page, with or without a link, and it now carries real weight in what AI systems say about you.

Answer engines synthesise from many sources. Consistent, accurate mentions across directories, press, review sites and local media shape both whether you get recommended and how you get described. Unlinked mentions used to be a nice-to-have; for GEO they are core inventory.

Search experience

Whether the page you land on actually satisfies the search that sent you there.

Search Experience OptimizationSXO

Search Experience Optimization (SXO) is the practice of optimising for what happens after the click — whether the page actually satisfies the intent that produced the search.

SXO treats ranking as the start of the job, not the end. It reads a SERP backwards to work out what page type Google is rewarding for a query — a comparison, a location page, a how-to — and then judges whether your page delivers that fast enough to stop the searcher going back. It is the discipline that explains why a technically flawless page can rank on page one and still convert nothing.

Search intent

Search intent is the underlying goal behind a query — to learn something, to find a specific site, to compare options, or to buy.

Mismatched intent is the most common reason good content fails. "Emergency plumber near me" wants a phone number above the fold, not a 2,000-word guide to pipe materials. Read the current top ten results: whatever page type dominates is Google's stated answer on what the intent is.

Zero-click search

A zero-click search is one where the user gets their answer on the results page itself and never visits a website.

Featured snippets, map packs, knowledge panels and now AI Overviews all produce them, and they are the majority of some query types. The strategic response is not to fight it but to be the source inside the answer, and to reserve your website for the queries where a click is the natural next step — quotes, bookings, comparisons.

Featured snippet

A featured snippet is the boxed answer Google lifts from a page and shows above the standard results, sometimes called position zero.

Snippets are won with format as much as authority: a direct 40–60 word answer immediately under a question-shaped heading, or a clean list or table. The same structural habits now feed AI Overview citations, so the work does double duty.

Pogo-sticking

Pogo-sticking is when a searcher clicks a result, immediately returns to the results page, and clicks a different one.

It is the clearest behavioural signal that a page failed the intent behind the query. Slow loads, interstitials, a headline that does not match the title tag, and answers buried below three paragraphs of preamble are the usual causes — all of them fixable.

Local search

The signals that decide who shows up in the map results for a nearby search.

Map Pack

The Map Pack (or Local Pack) is the block of three business listings with a map that Google shows for searches with local intent.

For most local businesses it is the single most valuable piece of real estate in search — it sits above the organic results and carries the call button. Ranking in it is driven by relevance, distance and prominence, which is a different recipe from classic organic SEO.

Google Business ProfileGBP

A Google Business Profile is the free listing that controls how a business appears in Google Maps and the Map Pack.

Categories, services, hours, attributes, photos, Posts and Q&A are all ranking and conversion surfaces. It is the highest-leverage asset in local SEO and the one most often left untouched for months at a time.

NAP consistencyNAP

NAP consistency means your business Name, Address and Phone number appear in exactly the same form everywhere they are published online.

Mismatches — an old phone number, "St" versus "Street", a missing suite number — fragment the trust signals that tell Google two listings are the same business. Cleaning them up is unglamorous and reliably moves local rankings.

Citation

A citation is any online mention of your business name, address and phone number, typically on a directory, review site or local listing.

Volume matters less than accuracy and authority. A clean presence on the handful of directories Google actually consults beats a hundred scraped listings with the wrong phone number. Citations also feed what AI answer engines know about you.

Geo-grid tracking

Geo-grid tracking measures your local rankings from many simulated locations across a map rather than from one point.

It is how you prove proximity effects to a client and how you find the pockets where you are invisible two miles from the shop. Not to be confused with GEO, which is generative engine optimization.

Technical SEO

The plumbing that decides whether a page can be crawled, understood and trusted.

Schema markup

Schema markup is structured data added to a page — usually as JSON-LD — that tells search engines explicitly what the content represents.

LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage, Article, Product and Review types are the common ones. It does not rank a page on its own, but it is how you become eligible for rich results, and it gives AI systems unambiguous facts instead of guesses about your hours, prices and service area.

Entity SEO

Entity SEO is optimising for the things a search engine recognises — a business, a person, a place, a concept — rather than for keyword strings.

Search engines resolve queries to entities and then reason about relationships between them. Consistent naming, structured data, an About page that states plainly who you are, and corroborating mentions elsewhere all help a machine confidently identify you as one specific entity.

Knowledge Graph

The Knowledge Graph is Google's database of entities and the relationships between them, and it powers knowledge panels and much of what AI answers assert as fact.

You cannot edit it directly. You influence it with consistent structured data, an authoritative About page, accurate directory listings and third-party coverage that corroborates the same facts.

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, TrustE-E-A-T

E-E-A-T is Google's framework for assessing content quality across four signals: first-hand Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust.

It is not a score in the algorithm — it is what quality raters are told to look for, and it shapes what the algorithm is tuned toward. In practice: named authors with real credentials, genuine first-hand detail, citations to primary sources, visible contact information, and no unsupported claims.

Crawlability & indexability

Crawlability is whether a search engine can reach a page; indexability is whether it is allowed to store and serve it.

A page can be perfectly crawlable and still be excluded by a noindex tag, a canonical pointing elsewhere, or a redirect chain. "Discovered — currently not indexed" in Search Console almost always traces back to one of these, and AI crawlers hit the same walls.

Canonical URL

A canonical URL is the single address you declare as the authoritative version of a page when several URLs serve the same content.

The classic own-goal is pointing canonicals at a URL that redirects — apex instead of www, or http instead of https. Search engines treat that as a mixed signal and indexing stalls. Pick one host, redirect everything else to it, and make every canonical, sitemap entry and internal link agree.

Passage indexing

Passage indexing is a search engine's ability to rank a specific section of a page independently of the page's overall topic.

It is why a long guide can surface for a narrow question buried in section nine — and why clear subheadings and self-contained paragraphs matter so much. The same property makes a passage easy for an answer engine to lift.

Query fan-out

Query fan-out is the technique where an AI search system silently breaks one question into several sub-queries, runs them all, and synthesises a single answer.

It means you are no longer optimising for the phrase the user typed. "Best emergency plumber in Hicksville" may fan out into questions about availability, pricing, licensing and reviews — and you need a credible presence on each to make it into the answer.

Topic cluster

A topic cluster is a group of related pages — one broad pillar page plus focused supporting pages — interlinked to signal depth on a subject.

Clusters built from real SERP overlap rather than keyword-string similarity are what establish topical authority, and they give query fan-out something to land on no matter which sub-question gets asked.

Measurement

The numbers worth reporting, and what they actually tell you.

Core Web VitalsCWV

Core Web Vitals are Google's three field-measured page experience metrics: Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift.

Targets are LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms and CLS under 0.1. INP replaced First Input Delay in 2024 and is the one most sites now fail. They are a tiebreaker in ranking but a first-order factor in conversion.

Interaction to Next PaintINP

Interaction to Next Paint (INP) measures how long a page takes to visibly respond after a user interacts with it, across the whole visit.

Unlike the metric it replaced, INP looks at every interaction rather than just the first, so heavy JavaScript that makes a menu or form feel sticky now shows up in the score. Under 200ms is the target.

Search Engine Results PageSERP

A SERP is the page of results returned for a query, including ads, map packs, snippets, AI Overviews and the organic listings.

Reading a SERP is the cheapest research in marketing. The features present tell you the intent, the page types tell you what format to build, and the amount of space left for organic links tells you what a #1 ranking is actually worth.

Conversion rate

Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete the action a page exists to produce — a call, a form, a booking.

It is the number that turns rankings into revenue, and the reason SXO exists as a discipline. Doubling a 2% conversion rate is usually faster and cheaper than doubling traffic.

Want this applied to your business?

Knowing the vocabulary is the easy half. We run AEO and SXO programs that get local businesses quoted in AI answers and converting the clicks they already have — alongside the local SEO fundamentals that still do most of the heavy lifting.

Not sure which of these you're losing?

We'll run a free audit across all of it — Map Pack visibility, AI Overview citations and what your pages do after the click.

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