AI search, in plain English

How well AI engines can read your site, understand what it offers, and surface it when someone asks. A state you maintain as your content and the engines both change, not a one-time setting.

A conversational search experience from Google where you ask in natural language and get an AI-written answer you can follow up on, instead of a static list of links.

The AI-generated summary Google shows at the top of many results pages, written from web sources and often answering the question before any blue link.

Structured data that labels a page as an article and states its headline, author, and publish date, so a machine knows it is reading editorial content and who stands behind it.

A mention is when an engine names your brand in an answer. A citation is when it links or attributes that answer to a specific page of yours. For measurement, they are counted as two different things.

Structured data that labels the trail of pages leading to the current one, so a machine knows where a page sits in your site instead of guessing from the menu.

The single address you declare as the official version of a page, so engines know which URL to read and credit when the same content lives at several addresses.

A reference an AI engine attaches to its answer, naming or linking the source it drew on, so a reader can see which page the claim came from.

How current and accurate a page is right now, in its visible text and in the machine-readable labels around it, not just the date stamped on it.

Whether an automated crawler can reach, fetch, and follow the pages of your site, which is the precondition for any engine to read or use them.

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust: the qualities Google's guidelines use to judge content, which only help an engine if they are stated in ways a machine can actually read.

A specific real-world thing an engine can identify and reason about, such as a company, a person, a product, or a place, distinct from the words used to describe it.

Structured data that labels a question and its answer as a question and its answer, so a machine reads the pair as a fact instead of inferring it from the page layout.

The short answer box Google sometimes shows at the top of results, lifted from one page, that answers a question without the reader clicking through.

The practice of shaping a site so AI engines can read it, understand what it offers, and surface it in generated answers, rather than optimizing only for a human clicking a search result.

When an AI engine ties its answer to specific source pages it fetched, rather than generating from memory alone, so the response is anchored to something it actually read.

When an AI engine states something as fact that is not true, either invented outright or misread from a source, presented with the same confidence as a correct answer.

The order and nesting of a page's headings, one main title and the sub-points beneath it, that tells a reader, human or machine, how the page is organized and where each answer lives.

Structured data that labels a set of instructions as ordered steps, so a machine reads step one, step two, and step three as a sequence instead of guessing from headings.

A small block of code, usually tucked in the page head, that carries structured data as plain labeled facts a machine can read without parsing your layout.

A map of real-world things and how they relate, built by an engine so it can reason about facts and connections rather than matching words on a page.

A plain-text file at the root of your site that points AI engines and crawlers to the pages and content you most want them to read.

Content structured and labeled so an automated reader can parse what it is and what it means, not just display it the way a person sees it.

A set of meta tags in a page's head that declare a title, description, and image for how the page should be represented when it is shared or summarized.

Structured data that states the identity of the business behind a site, its name, logo, contact details, and profiles, so a machine knows who is speaking rather than guessing from the footer.

Structured data that labels a product's name, price, availability, and details as facts, so a machine reads them directly instead of scraping them from a styled layout.

A method where an AI model fetches outside documents at answer time and writes its reply from what it just read, instead of relying only on what it memorized during training.

A plain-text file at the root of your site that tells crawlers which paths they may or may not request, acting as the gatekeeper before any page is read.

Code added to a page that labels what its content means, so a machine knows this is a price, this is a question and answer, this is a business, rather than guessing from layout.

The full question or instruction a person types into an AI engine, written in natural language, that the engine answers directly rather than returning a list of links to sort through.

HTML that uses tags describing what each part of a page is, a heading, a list, a navigation block, an article, so a machine can tell structure from styling instead of seeing one flat wall of text.

How often your business shows up in AI engine answers for the questions in your category, relative to competitors, measured across a set of prompts at a point in time.

A labeled layer of code added to a page that states what each part of the content means, so a machine reads facts instead of guessing from layout.

A structured file listing your site's important URLs so crawlers can discover them, along with hints about when each page last changed.

A search where the person gets their answer on the results page itself, from a snippet, an AI summary, or a knowledge panel, and never clicks through to a website.