Glossary

SEO and AI-search terms, defined by mechanism. Each entry explains what the thing is, why it matters, and where the tooling fits — no jargon circles.

A

3 terms

Agent Readiness Agent readiness measures whether AI agents — not just crawlers — can actually use your site: structured endpoints, machine-readable docs, MCP servers, and clear licensing for automated use.
AI Overviews Google's AI Overviews generate an answer summary at the top of the results page and cite sources.
AI Share of Voice AI share of voice measures how often your brand appears in AI-generated answers relative to competitors across a tracked prompt set.

B

1 term

BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) BLUF is a writing structure that puts the conclusion in the first paragraph before the evidence.

C

1 term

Crawl Budget Crawl budget is the number of pages Googlebot will fetch from your site per day.

E

1 term

E-E-A-T Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness — the quality lens Google's raters apply and its systems increasingly reward.

G

2 terms

I

1 term

IndexNow IndexNow is an open protocol to tell participating search engines instantly about new or changed URLs — one ping, shared across engines, replacing passive crawl discovery.

K

1 term

KGR (Keyword Golden Ratio) The Keyword Golden Ratio is a method for finding long-tail keywords with almost no competition: allintitle results divided by monthly search volume below 0.25.

L

1 term

llms.txt llms.txt is a proposed standard file that tells LLMs and AI crawlers what your site is about and which pages matter most.

Q

1 term

Query Fan-Out Query fan-out is how AI search engines split one question into many sub-queries before assembling an answer.

R

1 term

Repo Readiness AI coding agents and AI answer engines now meet your repository before they meet your code or your product.

S

2 terms

T

1 term

Topical Authority Topical authority is the depth and connectivity of your coverage of one subject.

W

1 term

Winability Score Keyword difficulty tells you how hard a keyword is for the average site.

Z

1 term

Zero-Click Search A zero-click search ends without a click to any website — the answer is absorbed by the results page itself.