Metadata
SEO and AI visibility
SEO and AI visibility
Metadata is information about a page rather than its visible content: title, description, canonical, language settings, robots rules and the data social platforms use for a preview.
The main parts: title and description for search results, canonical to point at the right URL, hreflang for language versions, robots to steer indexing and Open Graph tags for how links look in WhatsApp, LinkedIn and X.
There is also structured data (schema.org): machine-readable facts about your business, product or article that help search engines and AI assistants understand and cite your page.
In practice
Metadata is often set per template and therefore identical across hundreds of pages. That costs visibility; check per page type that title, description and canonical are unique and correct.
Related terms
- Meta titleThe meta title (title tag) is a page's title in the code; Google usually uses it as the blue headline in search results and the browser shows it in the tab.
- Meta descriptionThe meta description is the short summary in a page's code that Google often shows as the descriptive text under the title in search results.
- Structured dataStructured data is schema.org code that states explicitly what a page contains: a product, an article, an organisation or a question and answer.
- CanonicalA canonical tag tells search engines which URL is the main version of a page that is reachable at several addresses.
- Technical SEOTechnical SEO is the part of SEO about findability and readability for search engines: crawling, indexing, speed, structure and error handling.