52 terms · updated in 2026

SEO & GEO Glossary in plain language

What GEO, llms.txt, AI visibility, semantic core and user-behavior signals mean. Short, no-fluff definitions for business owners and marketers.

0–9

301 redirect

Technical

A permanent redirect from an old URL to a new one. It preserves accumulated rankings when pages move or the site structure changes.

404 error page not found

Technical

The server’s response when there is no page at the requested URL. Broken links to such pages should be fixed or redirected. And your own 404 page can be made useful — like ours.

See our 404 page →
A

AEO Answer Engine Optimization

GEO & AI

Optimization for “answer engines”: voice assistants, quick-answer blocks and AI answers in search. Closely related to GEO: the goal is for the answer to a user’s question to be built on your content.

AI bots AI crawlers

GEO & AI

Robots that collect pages for model training and for real-time answers: GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot and others. If they are blocked in robots.txt, AI assistants may not see your site.

Check access for AI bots →

AI hallucinations

GEO & AI

Confident but incorrect answers from a model: outdated prices, non-existent services, someone else’s contact details. Accurate and consistent information about the company across different sources reduces the risk of such errors.

AI Overviews Google’s AI-generated summaries

GEO & AI

AI-generated answers in Google that appear above the regular search results and link to their sources.

AI visibility visibility in AI assistants

GEO & AI

How often AI assistants mention a company when answering the typical questions of customers in your niche. Measured across a set of questions and several AI assistants — for example, in PromoLab AI Radar.

PromoLab AI Radar →

Anchor text

SEO

The clickable text of a link. Anchor text tells the search engine what the linked page is about.

B

Backlink profile backlinks

SEO

Links to a site from other resources. Quality, topically relevant links are a signal of authority; buying links in bulk on dubious sites leads to penalties.

Brand mention unlinked mentions

GEO & AI

A mention of a company on third-party websites, in the media, on review sites and in directories — even without a link. For AI assistants, it is one of the main signals that the company can be trusted.

C

Canonical canonical URL

Technical

A tag that points to the main version of a page when the same content is available at several URLs.

Citation in AI answers your site as a source in an AI answer

GEO & AI

When an AI assistant cites your website as the source of its answer and links to it. Such visits are a new traffic channel alongside search.

Conversion rate

Analytics & advertising

The share of visitors who completed a target action: sent an enquiry, called, made a purchase. Traffic growth without conversion growth does not help the business.

Core Web Vitals LCP, INP, CLS

Technical

Google’s speed and usability metrics: LCP — loading of the main content, INP — responsiveness to user actions, CLS — layout stability during loading.

Cost per lead CPL

Analytics & advertising

What one lead costs: the channel’s expenses divided by the number of enquiries it generated. The key metric for comparing SEO, advertising and other channels.

Crawl budget

Technical

How many pages a search robot is willing to crawl on a site within a given time. Important for large catalogs: unnecessary duplicates and junk pages waste it.

D

Duplicate pages

Technical

Identical or nearly identical content at different URLs: with parameters, with and without a trailing slash. They dilute page authority and hinder ranking.

E

E-E-A-T experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trust

SEO

Google’s principles for assessing content quality: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust. Especially important in topics related to health and money.

Entity named entity

GEO & AI

An object that a search engine or AI assistant recognizes as a distinct concept: a company, person, place, product. The more consistent the information about a company is on its website, on maps and in directories, the more confidently it is “recognized”.

G

GEO Generative Engine Optimization

GEO & AI

Optimizing a website and a brand’s online presence so that generative AI assistants — ChatGPT, Alice, GigaChat, DeepSeek — mention and recommend the company in their answers. It works alongside SEO, not instead of it.

GEO services →

Geo-dependent queries

SEO

Queries whose results depend on the user’s region: “apartment renovation”, “dentist near me”. For these, the site’s regional assignment and the business listing on maps matter.

Goals in Yandex Metrica

Analytics & advertising

Events set up in Yandex Metrica — a form submission, a click on a phone number or messenger. They are used to count enquiries and measure channel performance.

I

Internal linking internal links

SEO

Links between pages of the same site. They help robots find pages, distribute authority and guide visitors to the right section.

K

Keyword clustering

SEO

Grouping queries by meaning and by similar search results so that each group has its own page and pages do not compete with each other.

L

LLM large language model

GEO & AI

A neural network trained on vast amounts of text that can generate answers: GPT models, YandexGPT, GigaChat and others. LLMs power chatbots and AI answers in search.

llms.txt a file for language models

GEO & AI

A text file in the site root with a short description of the company and links to key pages in Markdown format. A proposed standard that helps language models quickly understand what a site is about.

Check your website →

Local SEO

SEO

Promotion within a city and on maps: listings in Yandex Business, 2GIS and Google Business Profile, reviews, and regional pages on the site.

M

Mobile-first mobile-first indexing

Technical

Search engines evaluate the mobile version of a site first. If a page is inconvenient or stripped down on a phone, it shows in the rankings.

O

Organic traffic

SEO

Visits to a site from free search results — not from ads. The main result of SEO, and one that does not disappear when the ad budget runs out.

P

PPC advertising Yandex Direct

Analytics & advertising

Ads in search and on websites paid for per click or per impression. It brings in leads quickly, but only as long as the budget is being spent.

SEO and Yandex Direct →

Prompt a query to an AI assistant

GEO & AI

A question or task that a user writes to an AI assistant. In GEO, we analyze the typical prompts of customers in a niche: “recommend…”, “where is the best…”, “how much does…”.

R

RAG Retrieval-Augmented Generation

GEO & AI

An approach in which the AI model retrieves up-to-date documents — for example, from a search index — before answering and relies on them. That is why GEO requires a site that is accessible to robots and contains accurate facts.

robots.txt

Technical

A file in the site root with rules for search engine and AI robots: which sections may be crawled and which may not. A mistake in it can hide the entire site from search.

Check robots.txt →

ROMI return on marketing investment

Analytics & advertising

A measure of how much profit your marketing investment generated: (revenue from the channel − costs) / costs × 100%.

S

Sales funnel

Analytics & advertising

The customer’s path from first contact to purchase: impression → click → enquiry → deal. Some people drop off at every step, and marketing’s job is to reduce those losses.

Search intent user intent

SEO

What a person wants to achieve with a query: buy, learn, compare, find an address. Commercial queries lead to service and product pages; informational ones lead to articles.

Search volume

SEO

How many times a month a query is entered into a search engine. For Yandex, it is checked in Wordstat. By search volume, queries are divided into high-, medium- and low-volume.

Semantic core

SEO

The list of search queries a site is promoted for, distributed across its pages (also called a keyword set). The foundation of the site structure and content plan.

SEO search engine optimization

SEO

A set of activities to get a site ranking high in Yandex and Google for the right queries and bringing in targeted traffic: audit, keyword research, technical optimization, content and links.

SEO services →

SERP search engine results page

SEO

The search results page: organic results, ads, maps, quick answers and AI answers.

Share of mentions share of voice in AI answers

GEO & AI

The percentage of AI answers that mention your brand compared with competitors. The key GEO metric: it shows whom AI assistants recommend more often.

sitemap.xml XML sitemap

Technical

A list of the site’s pages for robots. It helps them find new and updated pages faster, especially on large sites.

Snippet

SEO

The description of a result on the search results page: title, text, URL and additional elements — rating, prices, answers to questions. An attractive snippet increases click-through rate.

Structured data Schema.org

Technical

Code that describes the page’s data for search engines and AI assistants: the organization, services, prices, reviews, questions and answers. It helps you get a rich snippet and land in AI answers more accurately.

Check your structured data →
T

Title and description meta tags

Technical

The page title and description for search engines. The title is one of the main relevance signals; the description often ends up in the snippet.

Top 10 top 3

SEO

The first ten (three) results of the organic search results. These are the ones that get the bulk of the clicks.

U

User-behavior signals behavioral factors

SEO

How users interact with a site after arriving from search: whether they click through, how long they stay, whether they return to the results page. Especially important in Yandex. Faking behavioral signals is a gray-hat tactic that gets sites demoted in search.

UTM parameters

Analytics & advertising

Parameters in a link (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign) that tell analytics where a visitor came from.

W

Webmaster and Search Console Yandex Webmaster, Google Search Console

Technical

Free services for site owners: indexing, errors, the queries the site appears for in search, and notifications about penalties.

Website audit

SEO

A review of the site’s technical health, structure, content, links and competitors. The result is a list of issues and a prioritized work plan.

Free SEO audit →
Y

YMYL Your Money or Your Life

SEO

Topics that affect people’s health, finances, safety and well-being: medicine, finance, law, education. Search engines hold them to higher standards of expertise.

How this affects pricing →
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