Glossary
Every term below is defined in one paragraph a person can actually use, with the detail underneath for when you need it. No jargon explained with more jargon.
AEO is making your business the answer AI assistants give. When someone asks ChatGPT or Google's AI a question in your market, AEO work decides whether you are mentioned in the reply. It rewards clear, factual, well-structured content that machines can quote confidently.
AI citations are moments when an AI assistant names your business in an answer. Citations are the AEO equivalent of a first-page ranking: they cannot be bought, only earned through content machines trust. Herald tracks yours and logs every one.
Core Web Vitals are three measurements Google uses to describe how a page feels to use: how fast the main content appears, how quickly the page responds to input, and how much the layout moves while loading. They are a ranking signal, and a small one.
Crawling is how search engines read your website: a program visits each page, follows the links, and records what it finds. If a page cannot be crawled, it cannot rank. Digger crawls your site the same way, which is how problems are found before they cost you visitors.
E-E-A-T is the set of qualities Google's human quality raters are asked to look for when judging a page. It is not a score in the ranking algorithm. It describes what good is supposed to look like, which is why it still shapes what gets rewarded.
GEO is the practice of earning citations from generative AI systems: chat assistants, AI overviews, and answer engines. GEO overlaps heavily with AEO and the terms are often used interchangeably. Both come down to being the source machines trust enough to quote.
Indexing is a search engine deciding to keep a page it has crawled, and storing it so it can be returned for a search. A page can be crawled and still not indexed, usually because the engine judged it thin, duplicated, or not worth storing.
Keyword difficulty is a score estimating how hard it would be to rank on the first page for a term, based mostly on how strong the sites already ranking are. It is a tool's opinion, scaled zero to one hundred, not a measurement.
LLM SEO is optimising content so large language models can find, understand and cite it. In practice: direct answers near the top of the page, consistent facts about your business across the web, and structured data machines can parse. The newest branch of search work, and the fastest growing.
Search volume is an estimate of how many times a term is searched in a given market each month. It is a rounded, modelled figure, not a count, and it says nothing about whether those searchers want to buy anything.
SEO automation is using software to run search work that people once did by hand: research, audits, drafting, checking, publishing, reporting. Good automation is not about volume; it is about consistency and proof. Bad automation publishes anything. That difference is why Checker exists.
The standard is the fixed set of checks every Searchlings draft must pass before publishing: word count range, keyword frequency, link accuracy, sentence and comma limits, banned clichés, and repeated-phrase detection. A draft either passes all checks or is rejected with numbered reasons.
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