Search Intent
What somebody actually wants when they type a query: to learn, to compare, to buy, or to find a specific site. Matching it matters more than matching the words.
Related terms
HowTo Schema
Markup for step-by-step instructions, labelling each step in order. Useful for anything procedural, and easy for an assistant to reproduce accurately.
Content Provenance
A record of where a piece of content came from and how it was made, sometimes attached to the file itself. Emerging as a way to tell an original photograph from a generated one.
Topical Authority
Being recognised as a reliable source on a subject rather than on a single keyword, usually by covering it thoroughly and consistently. It is what makes a small site beat a bigger one in a narrow field.
Zero-Click Search
A search where the person gets their answer on the results page and never visits a website. Common for opening hours, definitions and conversions — and increasingly common for everything else as AI answers grow.
Hallucination
When an AI states something false with complete confidence — an invented price, a policy you never had, a product you do not sell. The usual cause is that the correct fact was not available anywhere it could read.
Semantic Search
Search that works on meaning rather than exact words, so a page can match a query it never literally contains. It is why writing naturally now beats repeating a keyword.