Synthetic Content
Text, images or video produced by AI. Not penalised for being synthetic, but it is judged by the same standard as anything else — and thin AI-written pages fail that standard easily.
Related terms
AI Bias
When a system produces unfair results because its training data reflected an unfair world. It matters commercially as well as ethically: a biased model makes confidently wrong decisions about real people.
Vector Search
Searching by meaning rather than by matching words. A page that never uses the phrase somebody typed can still be the best answer, and vector search is what finds it.
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.
Author Authority
The weight given to content because of who wrote it. Advice attributed to a named person with a real background is treated very differently from advice signed by a company or by nobody.
robots.txt
A plain text file at the root of a site listing which bots may read what. It is a request rather than a lock — well-behaved crawlers obey it, and all the major AI crawlers do.
BreadcrumbList Schema
Markup describing where a page sits in the site’s hierarchy. It helps both search engines and assistants understand that a page is a service under a category, not a stray document.