Glossary
Anyone who manages a site runs into words like canonical, schema or llms.txt. Here each one has a definition of two or three sentences, an example taken from a real trade and, where relevant, the place where Trovavio checks it.
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Check your siteAn AI citation happens when an assistant such as ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini names your site as a source in its answer, with or without a link. It is the result that GEO tries to achieve.
Example Asked for «a good accountant in Turin», the assistant lists three firms and cites their page: for those firms it is a citation.
An AI crawler is the program an artificial intelligence company uses to read website pages, to answer questions or to train its models. GPTBot and PerplexityBot are two examples.
Example If your robots.txt forbids GPTBot, ChatGPT's crawler cannot read the site and is unlikely to cite it.
AI Overviews are the summaries generated by artificial intelligence that Google shows at the top of some searches, before the traditional results. They draw on several web pages and can show links to their sources.
Example Someone searching «how to whiten a tooth» may see a summary with two or three cited sources. Being one of those sources is the goal of GEO.
The alt text is the written description of an image, in the page's code. It serves people who cannot see the image, such as those using a screen reader, and engines, which use it to understand what the image shows.
Example For a photo of a treatment room, «Treatment room of the practice, with chair and lamp» is worth more than «IMG_0042».
The breadcrumb is the line that shows where you are in the site, for example Home, Services, Implants. Declared as structured data, it helps Google and AI understand how the pages are organised.
Example A page three levels deep has a path Home, Services, Implants. Without it, to an engine it is an isolated page.
The canonical is the address you declare as the main one for a page, when the same content can be reached from several addresses. It tells engines which version to count and avoids duplicate content.
Example The same page opens with and without www: the canonical says which of the two Google should show.
Citation readiness shows how well a page is written and declared so that an AI assistant can use it as a source. In Trovavio it reads as a band from A+ to F, together with the AI bot matrix.
Example A page with an author, a date, direct answers and no block on bots is more ready than an anonymous page closed to crawlers.
E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: the criteria Google describes in its guidelines for judging the quality of a page. It is not a score Google assigns, but a way of looking at the signals a page shows.
Example An article signed by a doctor, with a professional title and an update date, shows more signals than a text with no author.
GEO is the set of things that make a site readable and citable by engines that answer with artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. It sits alongside SEO, which aims at rankings in Google's results.
Example Stating who you are, where you work and answering customers' questions with direct sentences are GEO work.
The Google Business Profile is the free listing through which a business appears on Google Maps and in local search: name, address, phone, hours, reviews and photos. It is managed from Google, not from your site.
Example Someone searching «hairdresser near me» sees first the listings with hours and reviews: the listing's details must match those on the site.
Indexing is the step in which a search engine reads a page and adds it to its archive, from which it can then show it in results. A page that is not indexed does not appear, whatever is written on it.
Example A noindex tag left behind after a site redesign is a frequent cause of pages disappearing from Google.
The llms.txt file is a format proposal: a list, written in plain text at the root of the site, of the pages an assistant should read to understand who you are. It is not a mandatory standard and no engine promises to use it.
Example A restaurant lists in the file its menu, opening hours and contact page, with a one-line description for each.
Local SEO is the work that makes a business appear when someone searches for a service in a specific area, such as «dentist in Bergamo» or «restaurant near me». What matters is consistency of name, address and phone between site, Google listing and other directories.
Example If the site says «12 Via Roma» and the Google listing says «21 Via Roma», engines do not know which address is right.
The meta description is the short text, in the page's code, that Google may show under the title in results. It does not decide the ranking, but it persuades people to click; it is best kept between 120 and 160 characters.
Example «Dental practice in Padua: implants, orthodontics and hygiene, open on Saturdays» says what it is about in one line.
The meta title, also called the title tag, is the page title shown in the browser tab and, usually, as the blue headline in Google results. It is one of the most important signals on the page; it is best kept within 60 characters.
Example «Dentist in Padua, implants and orthodontics | Studio Rossi» names the trade and the city, the two words people search for.
Open Graph is the set of tags that decide how a link looks when you share it on WhatsApp, LinkedIn or Facebook: title, description and preview image. Without them, the platforms choose on their own, and often badly.
Example Sharing the pricing page on WhatsApp shows a card with a title and an image: Open Graph decides it.
A plugin is a program installed inside WordPress; a connector is a code snippet pasted into a site that does not use WordPress, such as Wix, Shopify or a custom-built site. Both read the site and apply the fixes you approve.
Example On a WordPress site you install the Trovavio plugin; on a Shopify shop you paste the connector code.
The robots.txt is a text file at the root of the site that tells robots, from search engines and AI companies, which parts of the site they may read. A ban written by mistake can remove the site from Google or from ChatGPT's answers.
Example A «Disallow: /» line under GPTBot stops ChatGPT's bot from reading any page.
Schema.org is the shared vocabulary, created by Google, Microsoft and others, used in structured data to describe the things a page talks about: a business, a person, a product, a question. Each type has fixed field names, the same for every engine.
Example The Dentist type describes a dental practice, the Restaurant type a restaurant: each has its own fields, such as hours and address.
SEO is the set of actions that make a site easy to find and understand for search engines such as Google: titles, descriptions, structure, speed, content. The goal is to appear higher in results for the right searches.
Example Writing a title that names the trade and the city, and making the page fast, are SEO work.
The sitemap is a file, usually in XML format, that lists the site's pages and points search engines to them. It does not guarantee indexing, but it helps engines find new or poorly linked pages too.
Example A shop that adds a hundred products tells Google about them through the sitemap, instead of waiting for it to find them on its own.
Structured data is information written in a format machines read without interpreting: who you are, what you sell, where you work, which questions you answer. It is usually written in JSON-LD, inside the page, and is not visible on screen.
Example A dental practice declares name, address, phone and hours in a structured card: Google and AI read them without hunting for them in the text.
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