Passage Ranking
When a search engine surfaces one relevant passage from a long page rather than judging the page as a whole. Clear headings are what make a passage findable in isolation.
Related terms
AI Readiness
Whether a website can be reached, understood and quoted by AI assistants. It covers crawler access, structured data, clear headings, published contact details and speed — the unglamorous things that decide whether a model will name you.
JSON-LD
The format Google and the AI assistants prefer for structured data — a block of machine-readable facts tucked into the page. It states plainly what prose only implies: this is the business, this is the address, this is the price.
AI Search
Searching by asking a question in ordinary language and getting a written reply, rather than typing keywords and choosing from links. It changes what a website has to do: be readable and quotable by a machine, not just findable.
AI Content Detection
Tools that claim to identify AI-written text. Unreliable in both directions, and worth knowing about mainly because somebody may point one at your content and draw a confident wrong conclusion.
Zero-Click Search
A search where the person gets their answer on the results page and never visits a website. Common for opening hours, definitions and conversions — and increasingly common for everything else as AI answers grow.
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
A technique where the AI first searches a set of documents, then writes its answer from what it found. It is how assistants quote current information rather than whatever was in their training data.