Marketers who create content need their blog posts, reports, videos and podcasts to be discoverable online. Because what’s the point of communicating if no one sees or hears those communications? But the rapid shift to AI-based search is putting pressure on content marketing teams to rethink their SEO (search engine optimisation) strategies.

This new era of GEO (generative engine optimisation) means that content marketers need to familiarise themselves with a variety of terms, some of which are new and others that they simply might not have been aware of before. Following are some of the most important terms to know:

• AI crawler – Crawlers are bots that visit and scan websites across the internet to access information that powers search engines, travel sites, ecommerce sites and more. According to the MIT Technology Review, crawlers account for half of all internet traffic and ‘will soon outpace human traffic’. It adds that traditional crawlers were ‘largely undisruptive and could even be beneficial’. By contrast, AI crawlers are ‘causing unprecedented disruption across the internet, pushing websites to their breaking points and, in some instances, bringing them to the brink of collapse,’ notes the United Nations University’s technology arm. This is because AI crawlers seeking data to train large language models are leading many websites to see surging traffic that increases their data bandwidth costs and degrades site performance.
• E-E-A-T – E-E-A-T stands for ‘experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness’, and Google’s updated automated ranking systems for search now give weight to content that demonstrates those qualities. Search Engine Journal writes, ‘It’s important to note that E-E-A-T is not a direct ranking factor in Google’s search algorithm. Instead, it is a guideline used by human quality raters to evaluate the overall quality of search results.’ However, Google uses the data from these evaluations to improve its algorithms. So, while E-E-A-T is not a direct ranking signal, optimising for it can indirectly improve a site’s search performance over time.”
• GEO – Generative engine optimisation was first described in this study as a ‘novel paradigm to aid content creators in improving their content visibility in generative engine responses through a flexible black-box optimisation framework for optimising and defining visibility metrics’. Search Engine Land defines GEO as ‘the process of optimising your website’s content to boost its visibility in AI-driven search engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google AI Overviews’.
• Google AI Mode – Google AI Mode is one of two AI-powered search modes on Google. (The other is Google AI Overviews.) Google says that AI Mode ‘expands what AI Overviews can do with more advanced reasoning and ways of interacting. It divides your question into subtopics and searches for each one simultaneously’. It’s accessible at google.com/aimode.
• Google AI Overviews – Google says that AI Overviews ‘help people get to the gist of a complicated topic or question more quickly, and provide a jumping off point to explore links to learn more. They were designed to show up on queries where they can add additional benefits beyond what people might already get on Search’. Although Google says that the addition of AI Overviews means that ‘people have been visiting a greater diversity of websites for help with more complex questions,’ a July 2025 study by the Pew Research Center finds that, compared to users who see traditional search results on Google, users who see an AI overview at the top of their search results are half as likely to click links to other sites.
• Google Zero – Coined by Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, in May 2024, Google Zero describes the moment ‘when Google Search simply stops sending traffic outside of its search engine to third-party websites’.
• robots.txt – Known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol, robots.txt is a text file that directs web crawlers and robots to not visit, scan, index or scrape some or all URLs on a website. However, in practice, this direction is not always heeded, including by some AI crawlers.
• scraping – The UK Information Commissioner’s Office defines web scraping as ‘the use of automated software to “crawl” web pages, gather, copy and/or extract information from those pages, and store that information (eg in a database) for further use”. PC Mag says AI scraping ‘takes existing text and images, of which there are trillions of examples online, and uses them to train an AI system’.
• zero-click experience – This refers to the trend of users not clicking on links to other websites after conducting AI-powered searches, whether using traditional search engines with AI features, AI-based search tools like perplexity.ai or AI chatbots like ChatGPT.