Learn
The terms, from the sources.
Short answers to the questions business owners ask about search and AI answers, written from the primary sources. Each page quotes what Google, OpenAI or the original authors actually published, links to it, and says the day it was read. Where something is a guess, such as how much assistants rely on llms.txt, the page says so.
Getting named in AI answers
Buyers now ask assistants. These pages cover how Google's AI features and ChatGPT find a site, and what's in your control.
AI Overviews
AI Overviews are an AI feature in Google Search that helps people understand a complex topic quickly and links to sites where they can learn more.
Sources read 2026-10-11Google AI Mode
Google AI Mode is a mode inside Google Search that answers complex, multi-part questions with an AI-written response, links to supporting web pages, and lets people ask follow-up questions.
Sources read 2026-10-11ChatGPT search
A site gets into ChatGPT search by letting OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot crawl it: OpenAI recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt and allowing requests from its published IP ranges.
Sources read 2026-10-11Answer engine optimization
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the work of getting a company's pages found, read and cited by AI answers, such as Google's AI Overviews and ChatGPT search.
Sources read 2026-10-10Generative engine optimization
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the name a 2023 research paper gave to making content more visible inside answers written by AI search engines.
Sources read 2026-10-10llms.txt
llms.txt is a Markdown file at the root of a site that tells AI assistants what the site is and which pages matter, proposed by Jeremy Howard in September 2024.
Sources read 2026-10-10How Google reads a page
Titles, snippets and markup.
Title tag
A title tag is the <title> element in a page's HTML, and Google uses it as one of several sources when it writes the title link, the clickable title of a search result.
Sources read 2026-10-11Meta description
A meta description is the <meta name="description"> tag in a page's HTML that summarizes what the page is about, and Google sometimes uses it as the snippet under a search result.
Sources read 2026-10-11Schema markup
Schema markup is structured data added to a page's HTML, using the shared schema.org vocabulary, that tells search engines what the page's content means, such as the ingredients and cooking time of a recipe.
Sources read 2026-10-11Canonical URL
A canonical URL is the URL Google picks as the most representative page from a set of duplicate or very similar pages, and it's the one Google usually shows in search results.
Sources read 2026-10-11Alt text
Alt text is the text alternative in an image's alt attribute, and it should say what the image means on that page, beyond how it looks.
Sources read 2026-10-11Featured snippets
A featured snippet is a special box in Google results that flips the usual format and shows the descriptive snippet before the link.
Sources read 2026-10-11E-E-A-T
E-E-A-T is Google's name for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, the qualities its ranking systems try to identify in content, and Google says trust is the most important of the four.
Sources read 2026-10-11Crawling and indexing
A page Google never fetches can't rank, however good it is, and most of what stops a fetch is in the site's own files.
robots.txt
robots.txt is a file that tells search engine crawlers which URLs on your site they may access, and it can't reliably keep a page out of Google.
Sources read 2026-10-11XML sitemap
An XML sitemap is a file that lists the pages, videos and other files on a site so search engines like Google can crawl it more efficiently.
Sources read 2026-10-11Crawl budget
Crawl budget is the amount of time and resources Google will spend crawling a single site, and it is set by two things: a crawl capacity limit and crawl demand.
Sources read 2026-10-11Internal linking
Internal linking means linking from one page on your site to another, so people and Google can find those pages and understand what they are about.
Sources read 2026-10-11Nofollow links
A nofollow link is a link with rel="nofollow" in its a tag, which tells Google you'd rather it not associate your site with the linked page or crawl that page from your site.
Sources read 2026-10-11Site migration SEO
Site migration SEO is moving a website to a new platform or address without losing the search traffic its old pages earned.
Sources read 2026-10-10Doorway pages
Doorway pages are pages built to rank for many similar searches that send people on to a less useful destination.
Sources read 2026-10-10Winning searches and measuring them
Picking searches worth winning, then reading honestly whether you won them.
Keyword research
Keyword research is finding the words people type into a search engine when they look for what you offer, then checking roughly how often they're searched.
Sources read 2026-10-11Backlinks
Backlinks are links on other sites that point to your pages, and they still matter.
Sources read 2026-10-11Local SEO
Local SEO is the work of getting a business to appear in the local results people see on Google Maps and Search when they look for something near them.
Sources read 2026-10-11Programmatic SEO
Programmatic SEO builds many pages from one search pattern and a dataset, such as a page per city for "software development company in [city]" or a page per pair for "[tool] vs [tool]".
Sources read 2026-10-10Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are three metrics Google uses to measure real user experience on a page: Largest Contentful Paint for loading, Interaction to Next Paint for interactivity, and Cumulative Layout Shift for visual stability.
Sources read 2026-10-11Click-through rate
Click-through rate (CTR) is the share of people who saw your result or ad and then clicked it, calculated as clicks divided by impressions.
Sources read 2026-10-11Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free Google service that shows how your site appears in Google Search and helps you fix problems.
Sources read 2026-10-11Questions
Why read these instead of an SEO blog?
Each page is built from a dataset row with its sources and the day they were read, and Heddle's checks fail the page if it claims something the row doesn't support. That's the same discipline Heddle applies to client sites.
How often are they updated?
Each page shows the day its sources were read. When a source changes, such as Google's llms.txt guidance in June 2026, the row is updated and the date moves with it.
Work with us
Let the agents bring you the leads.
Tell us about your business and who buys from you. On a short call we'll show you the searches your buyers make where you don't show up yet, and what the agents would do about them in their first month.
On the call, for your site
- The searches your buyers makeMeasured, with how many people make each one
- Where you show up, and where you don'tOn Google and in ChatGPT's answers
- The agents' first monthThe pages, fixes and links they would start with