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
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.
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.
Structured Data Testing
Checking that your markup is valid and says what you meant. Worth doing after every template change, because broken structured data usually fails silently rather than visibly.
JSON-LD
The format Google and the AI assistants prefer for structured data — a block of machine-readable facts tucked into the page. It states plainly what prose only implies: this is the business, this is the address, this is the price.
ClaudeBot
Anthropic’s crawler, which reads public pages for Claude. Like the others it identifies itself and follows robots.txt.
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.