SEO
SEO (search engine optimisation) is the work of making a website easy for search engines to crawl, index and understand, so its pages can rank in results and be chosen by searchers.
SEO is the practice of helping search engines find, understand and rank a site’s pages, and helping people decide to visit. Google’s SEO Starter Guide describes it in those two halves: making content understandable to search engines, and helping users find the site and choose it from the results. It covers technical access (crawling, indexing, canonical URLs), the content itself and the signals that show a page deserves trust.
It matters more in the AI-answer era, because it is the entry ticket. Google says a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet before it can appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and its May 2026 guide to generative AI features says that optimising for those features is still SEO.
Practical note: start every audit in Search Console’s page indexing report. A page Google has not indexed cannot rank, and it cannot be cited in Google’s AI answers either. Google is also plain that there are no secrets that guarantee a first-place ranking.