Real Estate Website & AI Search Glossary

An AI crawler is an automated program that fetches web pages on behalf of an AI company, either to train a model or to retrieve current pages while answering a question.

AI Overviews is the summary Google places above the ordinary results on some searches, written by Google's model and carrying links to the pages it drew from.

AI search visibility is whether an AI assistant names a specific business when a user asks it a question that business could answer.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of writing and structuring a web page so that a tool which answers questions directly, such as ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, or Perplexity, can quote it.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of improving how often a brand is mentioned and cited by AI systems that generate written answers.

An LLM citation is a link or named reference an AI assistant includes to show where part of its answer came from.

Passage retrieval is the step where a search or AI system pulls specific paragraphs out of pages rather than judging pages as a whole.

A canonical URL is the address a site nominates as the official version of a page when the same content is reachable at more than one address.

Click-through rate is the share of people who click a listing after seeing it, calculated as clicks divided by impressions.

A content hub is a group of pages on one topic, organised as a broad main page linking to detailed pages that each link back.

Core Web Vitals are three measurements Google uses to describe a page's loading experience: Largest Contentful Paint (how long until the main content appears), Interaction to Next Paint (how quickly the page responds to a tap or click), and Cumulative Layout Shift (how much the layout moves while loading).

Crawlability is whether a search engine or AI crawler can reach and read a page at all.

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

An entity, in search, is a specific thing a search engine recognises as distinct: a named person, a business, a place.

A featured snippet is the boxed answer Google shows at the top of some results, quoting a passage from a page along with a link to it.

A Google Business Profile is the free listing a business manages that supplies its details to Google Search and Maps, including name, category, service area, hours, photos, and reviews.

Indexing is when a search engine stores a page in its database so the page becomes eligible to appear in results.

Internal linking is the practice of linking between pages on the same website.

JavaScript rendering is when a page's content is assembled in the visitor's browser after the initial file loads, rather than being present in the HTML the server sends.

Keyword cannibalization is when two or more pages on the same site compete for the same search, which splits their strength so that neither ranks as well as one combined page would.

The local pack is the block of business listings shown with a map on searches that have local intent, usually displaying three businesses with their ratings, and a link to more.

A meta description is a short summary in a page's HTML that search engines may display beneath the title in results.

NAP consistency means a business's name, address, and phone number appear in exactly the same form everywhere they are published.

An orphan page is a page on a website that no other page on that site links to.

A rich result is a search listing with extra features beyond the standard title, address, and description, such as review stars, an FAQ dropdown, or a breadcrumb trail.

robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of a website that tells automated crawlers which paths they may request.

Search intent is what a person actually wants when they type a query, as distinct from the words they typed.

Structured data is machine-readable code added to a page that states the page's facts in a standard format, most commonly JSON-LD following the Schema.org vocabulary.

Thin content is a page with little or no value for the person who lands on it, whether because it is very short, duplicated from elsewhere, generated automatically at scale, or written to rank rather than to answer.

Topical authority describes how thoroughly a website covers a subject, judged across the site rather than page by page.

An XML sitemap is a file listing the addresses on a site that its owner wants search engines to know about, usually at /sitemap.xml.

IDX, or Internet Data Exchange, is the arrangement that lets a real estate agent display other brokerages' active MLS listings on their own website.

An MLS, or Multiple Listing Service, is a database of property listings maintained by a real estate board or association, through which member brokerages share listings with each other and agree terms of cooperation.

A VOW, or Virtual Office Website, is an arrangement that lets a brokerage show a broader set of MLS data, typically including sold prices and listing history, to registered users who have agreed to a broker-client relationship.

A call to action is the specific next step a page asks the reader to take, expressed as a button, link, or line of text.

Conversion rate is the share of visitors who take a defined action, such as submitting a form or booking a call, calculated as actions divided by visitors.

A landing page is a page built for one audience arriving from one source with one purpose, usually an advertisement or campaign.

Lead capture is the set of ways a website turns an anonymous visitor into a contact who can be followed up with, usually a form, a phone number, or a booking link.