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.
Related terms
E-E-A-T
Google’s shorthand for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust — the qualities its raters look for. Not a score you can see, but a decent description of what makes content worth surfacing.
Prompt Injection
An attack where hidden instructions in a web page or document trick an AI into ignoring its real orders. The reason a careful assistant treats page content as information, never as commands.
Embedding
A way of turning text into numbers so a computer can tell that “web hosting” and “website server space” are about the same thing. It is what makes search by meaning possible rather than search by exact word.
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.
Hallucination
When an AI states something false with complete confidence — an invented price, a policy you never had, a product you do not sell. The usual cause is that the correct fact was not available anywhere it could read.
Search Intent
What somebody actually wants when they type a query: to learn, to compare, to buy, or to find a specific site. Matching it matters more than matching the words.