Microdata
An older way of marking up facts, written as attributes on the HTML itself rather than in a separate block. Still understood, but JSON-LD is now the safer choice.
Related terms
ClaudeBot
Anthropic’s crawler, which reads public pages for Claude. Like the others it identifies itself and follows robots.txt.
Vector Database
A database built to store embeddings and find the closest matches quickly. It is the part of an AI search system that decides which of your pages is relevant to a question.
Review Schema
Markup for ratings and reviews, including who wrote them. It feeds the star ratings in search results, and gives an assistant something concrete to cite about your reputation.
Entity SEO
Optimising to be recognised as a specific, real thing rather than for particular keywords. In practice it means consistent naming, structured data, and being mentioned in enough other places to be corroborated.
Prompt
The instruction or question you give an AI. The wording matters more than people expect: the same request phrased two ways can produce noticeably different answers.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
Answer Engine Optimization is the work of becoming the source that answers a question rather than one of ten links offered. It matters because search increasingly replies with a written answer, and only one or two businesses get named inside it.