Definitions, written to be quoted.
Every term below is defined in one sentence a reader — or a system assembling an answer — can lift without the surrounding paragraph. That is the whole test.
Every term below is defined in one sentence a reader — or a system assembling an answer — can lift without the surrounding paragraph. That is the whole test.
Answer engine optimisation: making a brand’s information structured, sourced and unambiguous enough that a system which answers a question directly can use it and cite it. It is not a ranking technique — answer engines assemble responses rather than ordering pages.
Generative engine optimisation: building the external corroboration and entity clarity a generative system needs before it will state a fact about a brand. Where AEO is about what your pages say, GEO is about whether anyone else confirms it.
Work that makes a search system confident about which thing a page is about — a specific organisation, product or person rather than a name. It matters most when a brand shares its name with a larger or older business, because a system will answer questions about the one it understands better.
The finite attention a search engine spends on a site. It becomes a live problem when crawlable URLs can be generated without limit — faceted navigation being the usual cause — because the budget is then spent on pages nobody searches for.
Declaring which URL is the authoritative version of a page that is reachable at several addresses. It fails silently: a canonical pointing at the wrong URL costs nothing visible while consolidating signals onto a page you did not intend.
The attribute that tells a search engine which language or regional version of a page belongs to which audience. It is reciprocal: if page A declares page B, page B must declare page A, or the whole cluster is disregarded.
The hreflang value that names the page to serve when no declared language or region matches the visitor. Without it, the market with the most signals tends to be served to everyone.
Machine-readable statements about a page’s content, usually as JSON-LD. Its one hard rule is correspondence: it must assert only what the page visibly shows, because structured data that contradicts the page is the strongest signal available, aimed the wrong way.
The forms a single product takes — size, colour, material. Published as separate URLs they compete with each other and split their own signals; the architectural question is what a shopper considers one thing.
What a person is trying to accomplish with a query, as distinct from the words in it. Intent differs by market as well as by language, which is why a translated keyword list is not a localised one.
Google’s generated answer shown above the results, assembled from sources it selects and cites. Appearing in one is a citation problem rather than a ranking problem: pages that rank can be absent, and pages that are cited can rank below the fold.
A store of entities and the relationships between them, used to resolve a name to a thing. Being in one is a consequence of consistent, externally corroborated facts, not something a site can assert about itself.
How often, and for which questions, a brand is named as a source by systems that answer rather than link. It is measurable, it is not correlated with rank, and it is the metric AEO and GEO are actually aimed at.
How a site’s content is divided, named and connected. It is the only layer where a mistake compounds: every later decision about content, linking and templates inherits it.
A score below 60 on the Atlas 100-point visibility scale: enough defects in the technical, architectural or entity layers that additional content or spend is unlikely to return anything until they are resolved.
Definitions are Atlas’s own, written for this glossary. Where a definition describes a measurement, the measurement is defined on the methodology page.
A definition is only worth publishing if it is true of your site too. Atlas reads the site before the first conversation.