The glossary: AEO, GEO, schema, and the words you need for AI search

A note on the 18 deep pages: each emits a DefinedTerm JSON-LD block¹ alongside the standard Article and BreadcrumbList graph. DefinedTerm is Schema.org's canonical type for a glossary entry. The hub itself does not emit a DefinedTermSet — the set would be valid² but adds no parser value beyond the individual deep pages, and would inflate the JSON-LD on a hub whose primary content is the index itself.

Where a term has rebranded or evolved — SGE consolidating into AI Overviews³, INP replacing FID as a Core Web Vital⁵ — both terms are listed and the deep page (where one exists) documents the change honestly. We do not gloss historical terms; we date them.

Above the fold

The portion of a page visible without scrolling; the first 200 words and main visual that AI engines weight most heavily when extracting an answer.

Alt text

The textual description of an image, supplied via the alt attribute, used by screen readers and by AI engines that index image content.

Anchor text

The visible, clickable text of a hyperlink; descriptive anchors carry more relevance signal than 'click here'.

Answer Engine Optimisation

Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews — extract and quote your page as the answer to a user's question.

Article schema

The Schema.org Article type used to mark up blog posts and editorial pages with headline, author, datePublished, and image.

Backlink

An inbound hyperlink from one site to another; the foundational off-site signal that PageRank — and now AI retrieval reputation — was built on.

BreadcrumbList

The Schema.org type that describes a page's position in a site hierarchy, used by Google to render breadcrumb-style URL trails in the SERP.

Canonical tag

A canonical tag (rel="canonical") is the link-element instruction that tells search engines which URL is the preferred address for a piece of content when duplicates or near-duplicates exist.

Citation

In AI search, the source URL an AI engine quotes inside a generated answer; in local SEO, a structured business mention (NAP) on a directory site.

Code Injection

The Squarespace feature that lets Business-plan and above sites insert custom HTML/JavaScript into the site header, footer, lock page, or individual page headers.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals (CWV) is Google's measurement set for real-user page performance — currently Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift.

Crawler

A bot that fetches pages from the web to index them; in 2026 this includes classical search crawlers (Googlebot, Bingbot) and AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot).

Cumulative Layout Shift

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is the sum of unexpected visible-element movement scores during the lifespan of a page; the Core Web Vital threshold for 'good' is 0.1 or less.

Google AI Overviews

Google AI Overviews (AIO) is the Gemini-powered summary block that appears above the classical Google results for an increasing share of queries, citing 3-5 source URLs.

DefinedTerm

The Schema.org type used on each glossary deep page to describe the term, its short description (definition), and the set it belongs to.

DOM

The Document Object Model — the in-memory tree representation of a page that crawlers and AI engines parse to extract content.

E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) is Google's Search Quality Rater Guideline framework for assessing whether a page deserves to rank for queries that affect health, money, or safety.

Entity

A uniquely identifiable thing (person, place, organisation, concept) recognised in a knowledge graph; the unit on which AI engines build retrieval, not the keyword.

Entity SEO

Entity SEO is the practice of structuring content so the people, organisations, places, and things on a page are recognised as distinct entities in Google's Knowledge Graph and the equivalent retrieval graphs of AI engines.

FAQPage schema

The Schema.org type for pages whose primary content is a list of Q&A; Google retired the FAQ rich result for non-government, non-health sites on 7 May 2026, but the type remains valid and parseable by AI engines.

Featured snippet

Google's pre-AIO answer block that lifted text directly from a high-ranking page; AI Overviews increasingly replaces these for query types that benefit from synthesis.

Generative Engine Optimisation

Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the broader discipline of getting cited inside generative-AI responses across every engine, including AEO plus retrieval-graph, entity, and citation-hygiene work.

Googlebot

Google's primary crawler; respects robots.txt and the rendering pipeline that converts JavaScript-heavy pages to indexable HTML.

GPTBot

OpenAI's training crawler, used to fetch web content for ChatGPT model improvement; distinct from ChatGPT-User (the in-conversation fetcher) and OAI-SearchBot (the search index).

Heading hierarchy

The H1 → H2 → H3 structure that AI engines and screen readers use to outline a page; on Squarespace 7.1 the section-based template often emits multiple H1s, which needs Code-Injection patching.

HowTo schema

The Schema.org type for step-by-step instructions; still rendered as rich results in some Google verticals and still parsed by AI engines as a structured how-to source.

hreflang

hreflang is the rel-alternate annotation that maps URLs to the language and region they target, helping Google show the right localized URL to the right user.

Indexing

The process of fetching, parsing, and storing a URL so it can be returned in search results; a page that is not indexed cannot rank or be cited.

IndexNow

IndexNow is an open protocol that lets websites instantly notify participating search engines (Bing and Yandex; not Google) that a URL has been added, updated, or deleted.

Interaction to Next Paint

Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is the time from a user interaction (click, tap, key) to the next paint; INP replaced First Input Delay as a Core Web Vital on 12 March 2024. The 'good' threshold is 200ms or less.

Internal link

A hyperlink between two pages on the same domain; the medium through which topic clusters communicate their hierarchy to crawlers and AI engines.

JSON-LD

JSON-LD is the JSON-based syntax Google recommends for emitting structured data inside a <script type="application/ld+json"> tag in the page's HTML head or body.

Knowledge Graph

Google's structured database of entities and the relationships between them; the substrate behind the right-hand SERP info panels and a major input to AI Overviews.

Largest Contentful Paint

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is the time from page navigation to the render of the largest visible image or text block; the Core Web Vital threshold for 'good' is 2.5 seconds or less.

llms.txt

llms.txt is a proposed plain-text manifest at the root of a site (e.g. example.com/llms.txt) that lists the URLs an LLM should prefer when answering questions about the site.

LocalBusiness schema

The Schema.org type for a physical or service-area business, used to declare name, address, phone, hours, payment methods, and service area.

Meta description

The HTML meta tag whose content is often (not always) shown as the snippet below the title in classical search results; Squarespace edits this in the SEO panel.

NAP consistency

The discipline of keeping a business's Name, Address, and Phone number identical across the website, Google Business Profile, and every directory listing.

Noindex

The robots meta directive (or X-Robots-Tag header) that tells search engines not to include a page in their index; Squarespace exposes this per page in the SEO settings.

Open Graph

Facebook's protocol for declaring social-share metadata (og:title, og:description, og:image) — picked up by most platforms when a URL is shared.

Organization schema

The Schema.org type for the publishing entity behind a site; pairs with Person (the founder) to anchor E-E-A-T signals.

PageRank

Google's original algorithm for ranking pages by the weighted count of inbound links; the conceptual ancestor of modern link-graph and retrieval-graph reputation.

Passage ranking

Passage ranking is Google's 2021 indexing change that lets the search engine rank specific passages from a longer page, not just the page as a whole — and the underlying retrieval pattern AI engines also use.

Perplexity-User

Perplexity's retrieval crawler used to fetch a page in real time when a user asks a question; must be allowed for a Squarespace site to be citable inside Perplexity answers.

Person schema

The Schema.org type for an individual; on this site it anchors the founder page and is referenced as the author of every Article.

Rich results

Google SERP features (FAQ accordions, How-To steps, recipe cards, review stars) rendered from valid structured data; the 7 May 2026 FAQ retirement narrowed the set substantially.

Robots.txt

The plain-text file at the root of a site that tells crawlers which paths they may fetch; Squarespace auto-generates this and exposes only limited overrides.

Schema.org

The collaborative vocabulary (founded by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Yandex) for structured data on the web; the source of every type used in JSON-LD blocks across this site.

Search Generative Experience

Search Generative Experience (SGE) was the 2023-2024 experimental Google Labs surface that consolidated into the production AI Overviews product in May 2024 — the term survives as historical reference.

SERP

Search Engine Results Page — the page returned by a search engine for a given query; in 2026 the SERP often includes an AI Overview above the classical results.

Service schema

The Schema.org type for an intangible offering (e.g. 'Squarespace SEO install'); pairs with Offer to declare price, availability, and area served.

Sitemap.xml

The XML file that lists every indexable URL on a site, optionally with lastmod, changefreq, and priority hints; Squarespace auto-generates this at /sitemap.xml.

Slug

The URL path segment unique to a page (e.g. /glossary/aeo/ has slug 'aeo'); Squarespace edits this in the per-page URL settings.

Squarespace 7.1

The current generation of Squarespace templates, section-based, fluid-engine-edited; structurally distinct from the older 7.0 template families.

Structured data

Structured data is machine-readable markup that describes the meaning of page content (an event, a product, a person, a recipe) in a standard vocabulary like Schema.org.

Title tag

The <title> element in the HTML head; Squarespace pulls this from the page title plus optional SEO title override, usually rendered as the blue clickable link in the SERP.

Topic cluster

A topic cluster is an internal-linking model in which a single pillar page covers a broad topic and a constellation of cluster pages cover sub-topics, with bi-directional links between pillar and cluster.

Training crawler

An AI crawler whose purpose is to fetch web content for model training (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended); distinct from a retrieval crawler that fetches at answer time.

URL Mappings

The Squarespace feature for 301 and 302 redirects; the workaround used to ship llms.txt by redirecting /llms.txt to a Squarespace page at /s/llms-txt.

User-agent

The string a crawler sends in its HTTP request identifying itself (e.g. 'GPTBot/1.2'); the value robots.txt rules and Squarespace's Crawlers panel match against.

XML

Extensible Markup Language — the format Squarespace uses for the auto-generated sitemap and the format any older RSS-style structured-data feeds use.

YMYL

Your Money or Your Life — Google's category for pages that touch health, finance, safety, or wellbeing, where E-E-A-T expectations are highest.

• AI-search vocabulary (AEO, GEO, AI Overviews, SGE, llms.txt, training crawler, Perplexity-User, GPTBot) routes into Pillar 1 — Squarespace × AI Search and its seven clusters (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini, Copilot, llms.txt, AI crawlers).
• Schema and structured data (Article schema, BreadcrumbList, DefinedTerm, FAQPage, HowTo, JSON-LD, LocalBusiness, Open Graph, Organization, Person, Service, structured data) routes into Pillar 3 — Schema & Structured Data.
• Core Web Vitals and performance (Core Web Vitals, LCP, CLS, INP) routes into Pillar 2 — Squarespace SEO Mechanics, Cluster 2D Site Speed.
• Classical-SEO mechanics (canonical, hreflang, indexing, internal link, meta description, noindex, robots.txt, sitemap.xml, slug, title tag, URL Mappings, user-agent) route into Pillar 2 and its clusters (SEO Panel, Indexing, Redirects, Code Injection).
• The question variants of every term route into the FAQ Hub — 50 questions answered in 40-80 words each.

A pattern worth noting: the more recent the term (DefinedTerm, INP, llms.txt, AEO, GEO), the more important it is for the Squarespace-specific install note — older mechanics like robots.txt and sitemap.xml are essentially the same across every platform, while the AI-era concepts each require an explicit Squarespace workaround. That's why the deep pages skew toward the new vocabulary, and the hub-only entries cluster around terms whose install is platform-agnostic.