SEO and AI Search Glossary

Plain-language explanations of the terms SEO Nerve checks. No fluff - what it is, why it matters, and how to check it on your site.

Agent-Ready is how prepared your site is for AI agents: bots that visit sites on their own, read them, and carry out tasks for a u…

AI Visibility is how often AI systems like ChatGPT and Perplexity cite your site in their answers. It is a new traffic channel: pe…

E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust) is the set of four signals Google and AI search use to decide whether yo…

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are three numbers Google uses to measure how fast and smooth your site feels: how long the main content takes to l…

Schema.org is special markup you use to label a page's content so search engines understand its meaning: where the price is, the r…

meta description

A meta description is a short page summary (about 150-160 characters) that Google shows under the title in search results. It does…

The title tag is the headline Google shows as the blue link in search results, and the browser shows on the tab. It is the first t…

A canonical tag is how you tell Google "this is the main version of this page." You need it when the same content is reachable at …

duplicate content

Duplicate content is when the same text is reachable at several addresses or repeated across pages. The search engine sees copies …

redirect (301 and 302)

A redirect is an automatic forward: a person or search engine visits one address but lands on another. You need it when a page cha…

robots.txt is a text file in your site's root that tells search robots which sections they may crawl and which to leave alone. It …

sitemap.xml is a file listing all the important pages on your site. It works like a table of contents: a search engine looks at it…

hreflang is a tag you use to tell Google which language and region a page is made for. Sites with versions in different languages …

A broken link is a link that leads nowhere: a person clicks and lands on a 404 error page instead of the content they wanted. Brok…

Mixed content is when a page is open over secure https but loads some of its resources (images, scripts, styles) over insecure htt…