Glossary
Terms behind the work
Plain definitions of the 33 technical SEO, AI search and data engineering terms this practice uses day to day. Each entry states what the term means, why it matters, and links to the primary sources rather than to summaries of them.
Claude vs ChatGPT vs Gemini vs Perplexity
Where each major AI answer system came from, how they differ in the way they retrieve and cite, and what that means for your content.
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Core Web Vitals
Three field metrics Google uses to describe loading, responsiveness and visual stability, measured on real visits rather than in a lab.
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Crawl Budget
The amount of crawling Google will do on a site, set by how much the server can take and how much Google wants the content.
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E-E-A-T
Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: the framework Google's quality raters use to judge content, and why it is not a ranking factor.
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JavaScript SEO
Making sure content that depends on JavaScript still reaches the crawlers and models that may never run it.
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Log File Analysis
Reading a server's own access logs to see what search engine crawlers actually requested, rather than inferring it from a crawl simulation.
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Schema Markup
Machine readable labels added to a page so software knows what the content is, not just what words it contains.
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Semantic HTML
Using HTML elements for what they mean rather than how they look, which is what makes a page legible to assistive technology, crawlers and language models alike.
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Technical SEO
The work of making a site crawlable, renderable and indexable, so that search engines and AI systems can reach the content in the first place.
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AI & Research 7
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AI Search Visibility
Whether your content is retrieved and cited inside AI generated answers, which is a different question from whether it ranks.
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Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews
Where each major AI answer system came from, how they differ in the way they retrieve and cite, and what that means for your content.
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Content Intelligence
Treating a content library as a dataset, so decisions about what to write, merge or retire come from evidence rather than opinion.
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LLM Extractability
How much of a page's meaning survives when it is read by a language model pipeline rather than rendered in a browser.
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Prompt Engineering
Designing the input to a language model so the output is reliable enough to build on, including the differences between how the major models expect to be asked.
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RAG Pipelines
Giving a language model the source documents it needs at question time, instead of relying on what it memorised during training.
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Search Generative Experience
Google's 2023 experiment in generative answers, which shipped as AI Overviews and later AI Mode. The name is now historical.
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Engineering 8
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BeautifulSoup, Playwright and Scrapy
Three Python tools for reading the web programmatically, each solving a different part of the problem.
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BigQuery, PostgreSQL and MySQL
Two transactional databases and one analytical warehouse, which are built for different shapes of question.
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CI / CD
Continuous integration and continuous delivery: merging work often and keeping the main branch in a state that could ship at any time.
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Docker
A way to package an application with its dependencies so it runs the same on a laptop, in CI and in production.
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ETL and Data Pipelines
Extract, transform, load: the pattern behind moving data from the systems that produce it into a place where it can be analysed.
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GCP, AWS and Digital Ocean
Three cloud providers at different levels of complexity, from a full managed data platform to a plain virtual machine.
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Litestar, Django and Flask
Three Python web frameworks that sit at different points on the same trade off between batteries included and bring your own.
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Python
A general purpose language whose data and HTTP libraries make it the default choice for search and content automation.
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Tools & Data 10
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Botify
An enterprise search platform that joins crawl data, server log data and analytics for sites large enough that crawl efficiency is the constraint.
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DataForSEO APIs
A commercial API for SERP, keyword and backlink data, used when you need search data as a feed rather than as a dashboard.
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DBeaver
A database client that speaks to most engines through one interface, which matters when a project spans several of them.
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Google Search Console
Google's own reporting on how a site appears in Search, including the only first party view of impressions, clicks and indexing decisions.
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LLM APIs
The programmatic interfaces to large language models, and the parameters that decide whether output is reproducible.
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Looker Studio
Google's free reporting and dashboarding tool, renamed from Data Studio in 2022.
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MCP
An open protocol that gives AI applications a standard way to connect to external tools and data sources.
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PyPI
The Python Package Index: the public repository that pip installs from, and the place you publish a package to.
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Screaming Frog
A desktop crawler that fetches a site the way a search engine would and reports what it found, one URL per row.
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Sitebulb
A crawler that puts more weight on explaining and prioritising what it found than on handing over the raw table.
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