# Search Result Optimization > Enough consensus on a subject, plus the questions the first page of results leaves out. 87 subject pages under 12 hubs, each with tests a reader can run. Search Result Optimization unifies the strongest findings from systems thinking, behavioral research, and semantic search engine optimization. SRO (Search Result Optimization) is the umbrella over SEO (Search Engine Optimization), AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), Generative AI, Digital PR, and SEA. Information Retrieval I is the capturing, asking and researching of real people, their thoughts and their behavior. It begins in the human areas beyond the World Wide Web, and it is the strongest insurance against AI hallucination. Information Embedding integrates this non-web data into web content. That brings Information Gain to online information and accelerates Information Retrieval II, the extraction and citation of information for searchers. The founder and owner of searchresultoptimization.com is Johannes Faupel, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (https://www.linkedin.com/in/faupel/). He offers paid consulting beyond SEO and GEO/AEO, based on the principle of unasked questions (information gain). ## Start here - [Search Result Optimization](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com//): The whole project in one page, with three tests to run first. - [Overview of all subjects](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/uberblick-aller-themen/): Every field, subject and page of this project, including the pages that are not listed below. ## Hubs - [Search engine optimization (SEO)](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/seo/): Classic SEO, Semantic SEO, answer engines and generative engines, Supervised Search, and why the money sits beyond the SERP consensus. - [Supervised Search](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/supervised-search/): Supervised Search turns a static page into a dialogue the visitor starts. This page defines the term, sets it apart from its legal and machine-learning namesakes, and shows the research it stands on. - [Digital PR](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/digital-pr/): Which kind of coverage exists about you, who produced it, and what it is worth once search engines and answer systems read it. - [Answer engine optimization](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/aeo/): Answer Engine Optimization is the work of being the source that sentence is built from. The ranking list is only the first step of a search now, and often not the step that decides. - [Generative engine optimization](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/generative-engine-optimization-geo/): Being the source a generated answer is built from, and knowing whether that answer is true. - [Epistemology](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/epistemology/): What makes a belief knowledge, who may say what is true, and what happens when a system takes that role. - [Large language models](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/largelanguagemodels-llms/): What these systems do, what governs their output, and which of it decides whether your material survives into an answer. - [Digital marketing](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/digital-marketing/): Nine topics that every marketing team meets every week. Below each one sits the part of the subject that buyers care about and that the first page of results keeps quiet about. - [Information retrieval](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/information-retrieval/): Nine topics from the discipline that decides which documents reach a person at all. Each one has consequences that the marketing consensus never mentions. - [Human-computer interaction](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/human-computer-interaction/): Eight topics about what actually happens in front of the screen, in the two seconds that decide whether your page is opened. - [Computational linguistics](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/computational-linguistics/): Eight topics about the processing that decides what your sentences are taken to mean, and what that costs when the reading is wrong. - [Social epistemology](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/social-epistemology/): Eight topics about what search does to what people believe, and what that means for anyone who publishes. ## Search engine optimization - [User intent](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/seo/user-intent/): User intent is person-based. It begins as a vague unease long before a query and keeps changing while the person searches. Search intent is the small part of it that reaches a search box. - [Pragmatics](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/seo/pragmatics/): Pragmatics studies how the situation around an utterance contributes to its meaning. Every query is an utterance made in a situation the system never sees. - [Deixis](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/seo/deixis/): Deixis is the part of language that points at the situation: person, place, time. A query built from deictic words means nothing until a situation is attached, and a quoted answer loses the attachment. - [Presupposition](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/seo/presupposition/): A person who types headache tablet has already assumed that the answer is a pill. Presuppositions carry that kind of assumption into every query, and search systems answer them without checking. - [Relevance theory](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/seo/relevance-theory/): Relevance theory defines relevance from the side of the mind: the effect a piece of information has, weighed against the effort it takes to process. That definition changes what a relevant page is. - [Latent semantic indexing (LSI)](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/seo/latent-semantic-indexing-lsi/): Latent semantic indexing is a retrieval method from 1988 that works on a fixed collection of documents. LSI keywords are a marketing claim that borrowed its name. This page separates the two. - [Conversational implicature](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/seo/conversational-implicature/): Conversational implicature, introduced by Paul Grice, describes how listeners infer what a speaker means beyond the words. Every query and every page works with it, and search systems read it poorly. - [Speech act theory](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/seo/speech-act-theory/): A search is an act: a request, a question, sometimes a complaint or a promise. Speech act theory, from J. L. Austin and John Searle, describes such acts and the conditions under which they work. - [Communicative intent](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/seo/communicative-intent/): Communicative intent is the goal a person pursues with a signal: a gesture, a look, a word or a query. Search systems classify it from text, and most of what carries it never reaches the text. - [Most common misunderstandings about SEO](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/seo/most-common-misunderstandings-about-seo/): Thirteen beliefs that still steer SEO budgets, each set against what Google has stated and what research has measured. - [Do you need a SEO agency for being successful on the web?](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/seo/do-you-need-a-seo-agency-for-being-successful-on-the-web/): What a site owner can handle without help, what Google itself advises before hiring anyone, and where outside work pays: beyond the SERP consensus. - [Why is page speed important for website success?](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/seo/why-is-page-speed-important-for-website-success/): What Google has said about speed as a ranking signal since 2010, what Core Web Vitals measure, and why the larger effect of a slow page shows up in visitors, long before rankings. - [Why are backlinks not the most important ranking factor?](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/seo/why-are-backlinks-not-the-most-important-ranking-factor/): How PageRank made links the currency of search, how Google devalued bought and spammy links, and why links now count as one signal among many. - [Why has a website to be user-friendly?](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/seo/why-has-a-website-to-be-user-friendly/): What Google counts as page experience, what it says usability does and does not do for rankings, and why a user-friendly site is the condition for every result that SEO is meant to produce. - [Why is Search engine optimization important?](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/seo/why-is-search-engine-optimization-important/): Fewer searches end in a click, answer engines speak for the web, and most pages receive no search traffic at all. Why SEO matters more under these conditions, and which SEO. - [Best search results](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/seo/best-search-results/): What search systems count as a good result, what searchers experience as one, and why the best result is the one that meets the user intent with the least effort. - [Intent collapse](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/seo/intent-collapse/): Answer engines compress many intents into a single summary, and pages try to serve every goal at once. What the term describes, what is measured, and what is still missing. ## Supervised Search - [YMYL](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/supervised-search/ymyl/): Google calls these topics Your Money or Your Life. Raters judge them with extra care, and answer engines still get them wrong. Why clarifying the situation first is the most protective thing a page can do. ## Answer engine optimization - [Direct answer optimization](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/aeo/direct-answer-optimization/): What is settled about direct answers, what the usual advice leaves out, and the questions companies arrive with once their rankings hold and their visits fall. - [Featured snippet target](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/aeo/featured-snippet-target/): What is settled about the answer box above the results, what the usual advice leaves out, and the questions that arrive once rank one stops delivering visitors. - [Voice search optimization](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/aeo/voice-search-optimization/): What is settled about spoken search, what the usual advice leaves out, and the questions that arrive when an assistant answers customers out loud without naming you. - [Conversational search](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/aeo/conversational-search/): What is settled about search that runs as a conversation, what the usual advice leaves out, and the questions that arrive when buyers ask a chat interface instead of a search box. ## Generative engine optimization - [Entity grounding](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/generative-engine-optimization-geo/entity-grounding/): Connecting what you publish to an identity a machine can verify, so the facts land on you instead of on somebody with a similar name. - [AI overview placement](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/generative-engine-optimization-geo/ai-overview-placement/): Getting into the generated block above the results, by paid placement and by being worth citing, and the difference between the two. ## Epistemology - [Epistemic authority](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/epistemology/epistemic-authority/): Who may say what is the case, and how a person without the expertise decides whether to accept it. - [Epistemic trust](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/epistemology/epistemic-trust/): The readiness to accept what somebody tells you, where it comes from, and what happens when the somebody is a system. - [Evidence](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/epistemology/evidence/): What counts as proof, who decides that, and why the question has an answer in medicine that it lacks online. - [Credibility](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/epistemology/credibility/): How a listener decides that a statement counts, and why rhetoric answers only the first half of that. - [Coherence](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/epistemology/coherence/): Whether statements hold together, whether that is a reason to believe them, and how it can be measured. - [Verification](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/epistemology/verification/): Whether a statement can be shown true, why the attempt failed, and what replaced it. - [Falsification](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/epistemology/falsification/): Refutation as the engine of knowledge, the ways it is evaded, and why the evasions matter more than the principle. - [Hermeneutics](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/epistemology/hermeneutics/): The theory of interpretation, and why a machine that reads your text is doing hermeneutics without a method. ## Large language models - [Hallucination](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/largelanguagemodels-llms/hallucination/): The word belongs to psychiatry. Everything the AI industry means by it is missing from the usual account. - [Context window](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/largelanguagemodels-llms/context-window/): How much a model can hold at once, why the advertised number is not the usable one, and what falls out of it. - [Prompt engineering](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/largelanguagemodels-llms/prompt-engineering/): Shaping what a model does through what it is given, and the techniques that sit below the visible text. - [Temperature parameter](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/largelanguagemodels-llms/temperature-parameter/): One number that decides how varied a model's output is, sold as a creativity dial and rooted in statistical physics. - [Fine-tuning](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/largelanguagemodels-llms/fine-tuning/): Adapting a trained model to a purpose, what it costs, and what it quietly takes away. - [Parameter-efficient fine-tuning](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/largelanguagemodels-llms/parameter-efficient-fine-tuning/): Adapting a large model by training a small part of it, and everything around that which decides whether it is worth doing. - [Instruction tuning](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/largelanguagemodels-llms/instruction-tuning/): Teaching a model to follow directions, and what teaching it to please costs. ## Digital marketing - [Search engine optimization](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/digital-marketing/search-engine-optimization/): A page one ranking can be a beautiful storefront on a street where no one ever goes. - [Conversion rate optimization](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/digital-marketing/conversion-rate-optimization/): A higher rate on a page that was reached by the wrong people is a more efficient way of losing them. - [Click-through rate optimization](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/digital-marketing/click-through-rate-optimization/): Impressions without clicks look like a headline problem. Clicks without reading are the more expensive problem. - [Search engine marketing](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/digital-marketing/search-engine-marketing/): Advertisers optimize the quality score and rarely see the mechanism that decides the price. - [Share of search](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/digital-marketing/share-of-search/): The portion of category searches that name your brand, used as an early reading of demand and as an argument in a budget meeting. - [Search intent](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/digital-marketing/search-intent/): Search intent is the reading a search engine gives a query. Pragmatics, the study of what people mean by what they say, is missing from that reading, and with it most of the person behind the query. - [Landing page optimization](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/digital-marketing/landing-page-optimization/): The page did not start on the page. It started with the line the searcher read before clicking. - [Keyword research](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/digital-marketing/keyword-research/): Consider that no one searches for websites. People search for solutions. - [Content marketing](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/digital-marketing/content-marketing/): How many guides to the same subject does a market need. Strictly speaking, best practice means best practice so far. - [Customer journey mapping](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/digital-marketing/customer-journey-mapping/): The map shows the stages the company can see. The decisive moments are the ones it cannot. ## Information retrieval - [Learning to rank](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/information-retrieval/learning-to-rank/): The system is trained on the behaviour it caused. - [Snippet generation](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/information-retrieval/snippet-generation/): It is written by a machine, from your text, for a query you did not know about. - [Query expansion](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/information-retrieval/query-expansion/): You are answering a question that was quietly edited before it reached you. - [Relevance feedback](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/information-retrieval/relevance-feedback/): Absence produces no signal. - [Query performance prediction](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/information-retrieval/query-performance-prediction/): A page of ten results looks the same whether the answer exists or not. - [Passage retrieval](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/information-retrieval/passage-retrieval/): Your page is being read in fragments by a system that never sees the whole. - [Mean average precision](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/information-retrieval/mean-average-precision/): A score of 0.87 tells you how well the ranking matched a list somebody wrote down. - [Vector space model](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/information-retrieval/vector-space-model/): If the web never described your case, the vector for it is somebody else's. - [Inverted index](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/information-retrieval/inverted-index/): The web is the part of knowledge that somebody bothered to publish and a crawler managed to reach. - [Precision and recall](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/information-retrieval/precision-and-recall/): The two measures behind every search evaluation, what they cannot see, and who decided what counts as relevant. - [Latent semantic analysis (LSA)](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/information-retrieval/latent-semantic-analysis-lsa/): Latent semantic analysis builds meaning from nothing but word counts. The mathematics that makes this work, and what it loses on the way, is usually left out. - [Controlled vocabulary](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/information-retrieval/controlled-vocabulary/): A controlled vocabulary fixes which word stands for which concept. It is the lexical level on which meaning can be found again, and it reaches from the library catalogue to the knowledge graph. ## Human-computer interaction - [Search user interface](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/human-computer-interaction/search-user-interface/): The layout decides how much of your answer a person ever sees. - [Interactive information retrieval](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/human-computer-interaction/interactive-information-retrieval/): People reformulate because they have learned something. Almost nobody plans for the second query. - [Information foraging](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/human-computer-interaction/information-foraging/): The decision to stay is made before the first paragraph is finished. - [Visual hierarchy](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/human-computer-interaction/visual-hierarchy/): Most readers will see four things on your page. You get to choose which four. - [Eye tracking](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/human-computer-interaction/eye-tracking/): Attention is a prerequisite. It is not comprehension and it is not agreement. - [Sensemaking](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/human-computer-interaction/sensemaking/): Ten good answers to ten narrow questions can still leave someone unable to decide. - [Cognitive load](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/human-computer-interaction/cognitive-load/): A reader who has to work to follow you has less capacity left for deciding. - [Usability testing](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/human-computer-interaction/usability-testing/): A perfectly usable page can still be the wrong page. - [Visual search](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/human-computer-interaction/visual-search/): Every result page and every web page is a visual search task. Cognitive psychology has measured for decades what makes a target easy or hard to find, and what people miss. - [Dual-process theory](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/human-computer-interaction/dual-process-theory/): People judge a result page in a second and think carefully only when something makes them stop. Dual-process theory explains both modes, and when the slow one takes over. ## Computational linguistics - [Extractive summarization](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/computational-linguistics/extractive-summarization/): The summary is now the article for most of the audience. - [Keyphrase extraction](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/computational-linguistics/keyphrase-extraction/): If your real subject is named once, it is not your subject as far as the system is concerned. - [Semantic search](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/computational-linguistics/semantic-search/): The engine got better at knowing what you meant. Whether anyone wrote the answer is a separate question. - [Named entity recognition](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/computational-linguistics/named-entity-recognition/): Being an entity is a prerequisite for being understood. Most small organizations are not one. - [Topic modeling](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/computational-linguistics/topic-modeling/): What a topic model can show about a collection of texts, and where its silence begins. - [Question answering](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/computational-linguistics/question-answering/): A confident single answer is the format. It is not always the truth. - [Word sense disambiguation](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/computational-linguistics/word-sense-disambiguation/): Your page competes in whichever meaning the system assigned to it. - [Sentiment analysis](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/computational-linguistics/sentiment-analysis/): A dashboard of positive and negative tells you the weather, not the cause. ## Social epistemology - [Search engine epistemology](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/social-epistemology/search-engine-epistemology/): Ten results that agree are ten results that were selected by the same criteria. - [Algorithmic bias](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/social-epistemology/algorithmic-bias/): Neutral procedure applied to unequal material produces unequal output. - [Filter bubbles](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/social-epistemology/filter-bubbles/): The result confirms the assumption that produced the query. - [Information quality](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/social-epistemology/information-quality/): Fluent and confident are easier to produce than accurate. - [Epistemic trust](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/social-epistemology/epistemic-trust/): Trust is the mechanism. The question is how it is earned and what it costs when it is misplaced. - [Echo chambers](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/social-epistemology/echo-chambers/): Adding facts to it changes nothing, because the facts arrive through a discredited channel. - [Distributed epistemology](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/social-epistemology/distributed-epistemology/): The part that is written down is the part that had a reason to be written down. - [Epistemic injustice](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/social-epistemology/epistemic-injustice/): A search result inherits that and turns it into an ordering. ## What a query takes for granted - [Pragmatic failure in search results](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/seo/presupposition/#what-is-pragmatic-failure-in-search-results): The section on results that are accurate and still unusable, at its exact place on the page. - [Presupposition](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/seo/presupposition/): What a query assumes before it is typed, and what happens when the assumption is wrong. - [User intent](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/seo/user-intent/): The whole purpose a person carries, of which the query is a small part. - [Relevance theory](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/seo/relevance-theory/): Topical connection and usefulness in a situation are different questions. - [Communicative intent](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/seo/communicative-intent/): What a person wants to accomplish with a query. - [Conversational implicature](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/seo/conversational-implicature/): Unstated meaning and context, kept apart from presupposition. - [Search intent](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/digital-marketing/search-intent/): The reading a search engine gives a query, and what it costs when that reading is wrong. - [Passage retrieval](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/information-retrieval/passage-retrieval/): A retrieved passage has to stay intelligible outside its page. ## Hub pages as Markdown Each hub is also served as Markdown at the same address plus index.md. The Markdown file names its canonical HTML page and links every section to its exact fragment. - [seo](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/seo/index.md) - [supervised-search](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/supervised-search/index.md) - [digital-pr](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/digital-pr/index.md) - [aeo](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/aeo/index.md) - [generative-engine-optimization-geo](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/generative-engine-optimization-geo/index.md) - [epistemology](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/epistemology/index.md) - [largelanguagemodels-llms](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/largelanguagemodels-llms/index.md) - [digital-marketing](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/digital-marketing/index.md) - [information-retrieval](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/information-retrieval/index.md) - [human-computer-interaction](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/human-computer-interaction/index.md) - [computational-linguistics](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/computational-linguistics/index.md) - [social-epistemology](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/social-epistemology/index.md) ## The project - [About Search Result Optimization](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/about/): Why this project exists and who runs it. - [Contact](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/contact/): How to get in touch. Offers are for business customers. - [E-E-A-T](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/seo/eeat/): Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: where the four letters come from, what each one actually asks, and what five older fields already call the same thing. - [Information Gain Audit](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/information-gain-audit/): The paid examination of a page or a domain, price on request. ## Optional - [Imprint](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/imprint/): Legal notice. - [Privacy Policy](https://www.searchresultoptimization.com/privacy-policy/): How data is handled.