Glossary

Whether an AI answer engine can retrieve a page and lift a usable answer out of it. One of the four readings behind a visibility temperature.

A system that answers a question directly by retrieving and summarising source pages, rather than returning a list of links to them.

Putting a direct, self-contained answer in the first paragraph after the H1, before any explanation or context.

A declaration in a page naming which URL is the real address for that content, so variants of it do not compete with each other.

An automated client that fetches web pages on behalf of a search engine, an answer engine, an archive or a tool.

Whether a page says what it is, who published it, and why it should be believed. One of the four readings behind a visibility temperature.

How easily a self-contained, reusable passage can be lifted out of a page by a system that wants to quote part of it rather than all of it.

The JSON format used to embed structured data in a page, carried in a script tag with the type application/ld+json.

A proposed plain text file at the root of a site describing what the site covers and which pages matter, written for language models rather than crawlers.

An instruction, in a meta tag or an HTTP header, telling search engines not to include a page in their index.

A set of meta tags declaring a page title, description, image and type for systems that render a preview of a link.

A sequence of two or more redirects between a requested URL and the page that finally answers.

The step where a system fetches source documents to ground an answer, before any text is generated.

A plain text file at the root of a site declaring which crawlers may request which paths.

A structured data property listing other URLs that describe the same entity, used to connect a page to an identity that already exists elsewhere.

Whether a search engine can reach a page, index it, and work out what it is a result for. One of the four readings behind a visibility temperature.

Content that arrives in the HTML the server sends, rather than being assembled by JavaScript after the page loads in a browser.

Machine-readable statements embedded in a page that declare what it is and what the things on it are, rather than leaving a parser to infer it from prose.

Whether a machine can get a page cleanly, quickly, and on the first try. One of the four readings behind a visibility temperature.

A single number between 0 and 100 degrees describing how much of a page a search engine or AI answer system can actually observe and use.