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Glossary

Name: AI Ready Web Designs
Telephone: +442039165869

Every AI search and website term used on this site, explained in plain English. If a word here still doesn’t make sense, that’s on me, not you. Get in touch and I’ll fix it.

AI Overview: Google’s AI-generated summary that appears above the normal search results for some searches. It pulls information from a mix of websites to answer the question directly and often recommend specific businesses, sometimes before anyone clicks a link.
AI search: Searching using an AI system like Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, or Gemini, rather than typing a query into traditional Google search. The AI reads and compares information from multiple sites, then recommends specific businesses or gives a direct answer, rather than a list of links to click through.
Alt text: A short written description attached to an image on a website. It’s read out by screen readers for visually impaired visitors, and it also helps search engines and AI systems understand what the image shows.
Anchor text: The clickable words in a link, for example “our services” rather than a raw web address.
Answer engine: Any AI tool built to give a direct answer or recommend specific options instead of a list of links, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO): Making sure a website is clear enough for an AI system to read, understand, and put forward as a recommendation, not just quote accurately, when someone asks it a question. A newer relative of SEO, built for AI answers and recommendations rather than search result rankings.
Backlink: A link on someone else’s website that points to yours. Search engines treat it as a small vote of confidence in your site.
Brand footprint: Everything the internet knows about a business, its mentions, reviews, citations, and listings, that AI systems draw on when deciding whether to recommend it.
Canonical URL: The one web address that a page should officially be known by, even if it can technically be reached a few different ways. Stops search engines getting confused about which version to show.
Citation: A reference or source link an AI system shows next to its answer, pointing to where the information came from.
Conversational query: A natural, spoken-style search, closer to asking a friend than typing keywords, for example “where’s a good coffee shop near me right now”.
Core web vitals: A set of measurements Google uses to judge how fast and stable a page feels to use, covering loading speed, responsiveness, and whether content jumps around while it loads.
Crawling: The process search engines use to scan a website’s pages and find out what’s on them.
CRM: Short for customer relationship management. A system that contact form submissions feed into automatically, letting you sort clients and prospects into categories and lists, track where each one stands, and send the right follow-up or marketing email to the right group.
Domain authority: A score, created by SEO tool companies rather than Google itself, that estimates how likely a website is to rank well against competitors. A rough guide, not a guarantee.
E-E-A-T: Google’s shorthand for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, the qualities it looks for when judging whether content is genuinely good.
Entity: A specific person, place, organisation, or thing that a search engine or AI recognises as a distinct real-world item with its own set of facts attached.
FAQ formatting: Writing content as clear questions followed by direct answers, a layout AI systems find easy to pull information from.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): A term some use for optimising specifically for generative AI models like ChatGPT and Gemini, which compose new sentences from your website data rather than just retrieving an answer. Others use it as a straight synonym for AEO. The distinction isn’t settled across the industry yet.
Google Business Profile: A free listing that shows a business’s opening hours, location, reviews, and contact details on Google search and maps. A key source of information for both traditional and AI search.
Header tags (H1, H2, H3): The built-in heading levels used to break content into sections, helping both readers and search engines follow a page’s structure.
Indexing: Once a search engine has scanned a page, indexing is it saving that page into its database so the page can actually appear in results.
Internal link: A link from one page on a website to another page on that same website.
JSON-LD: The technical format most schema markup is written in. It sits quietly in a page’s code where visitors never see it, but search engines and AI systems read it directly.
Keywords: The exact words or phrases someone types into a search bar when looking for something.
Knowledge graph: A search engine’s database of real-world facts and how they connect, for example linking a business to its location, owner, and services.
llms.txt: A simple text file some websites now publish to give AI systems a clear, condensed summary of what the site is and what’s on it. Still an emerging convention rather than a universal standard, and not every AI platform uses it yet.
Local SEO: Optimising a website and business listings so the business gets found and recommended when people nearby search for what it offers, for example “butcher in Orpington”.
LocalBusiness schema: A specific type of schema markup for businesses with a physical location or a defined service area. It states the business name, address, phone number, opening hours, and what it offers in a format machines can read directly.
Meta description: The short summary of a page that can appear underneath its title in search results. It doesn’t directly affect ranking, but a clear one helps people decide whether to click.
Mobile-first indexing: Google mainly looks at the mobile version of a website when deciding how to rank it, even for people searching on a desktop computer. A site that works badly on a phone is judged badly, full stop.
Schema markup: Extra code added to a website that labels information clearly for machines, for example marking a phone number as a phone number, or a price as a price. It removes the guesswork for search engines and AI systems.
SEO (search engine optimisation): The general practice of making a website easier for search engines to find, understand, and rank well. AI search optimisation is a newer branch of this aimed specifically at AI-generated answers.
Sitemap: A file listing every page on a website, submitted to search engines so they can find and read the whole site, including pages that might otherwise be missed.
SSL certificate (HTTPS): A security setup that encrypts data between a visitor’s browser and a website, shown as a padlock next to the web address.
Structured data: The general concept of organising information in a consistent format so machines can read it reliably, rather than having to guess at meaning from ordinary text. Schema markup is the specific vocabulary used to write it, so in practice the two terms get used interchangeably.
Thin content: A page that offers little real value or original information, the kind search engines tend to rank poorly.
Title tag: The clickable headline of a page shown in search results, separate from the main heading shown on the page itself.
User intent: The real reason behind a search, whether someone wants information, wants to buy something, or is looking for a specific website.
Zero-click search: A search that gets fully answered on the results page or by an AI, so the person never clicks through to a website.

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