Rich Result
A search listing with something extra — stars, prices, an image, an FAQ dropdown. Rich results come from structured data, and they take up more of the screen than a plain blue link.
Related terms
Agentic Browsing
An AI navigating a website on somebody’s behalf: finding the price, checking availability, sometimes buying. Sites that rely on hover menus and unlabelled buttons are hard for an agent to use.
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.
Synthetic Content
Text, images or video produced by AI. Not penalised for being synthetic, but it is judged by the same standard as anything else — and thin AI-written pages fail that standard easily.
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.
Predictive Analytics
Using historical data to estimate what will happen next: which customers will lapse, which stock will run out. Useful precisely to the degree that the past resembles the future.
AI Overviews
The written summary Google now places above its search results, assembled from several pages and citing a few of them. Appearing inside one can bring visitors; being left out of one can quietly cost you the clicks you used to get.