A <dl> pairs a term with its definition unambiguously; the same content in prose has to be inferred.
- Free, no signupNo account, no card
- No AI in the score986 deterministic rules
- Nothing publishedYour scans stay yours
- Answers in secondsQuick scan, no browser
How this rule is weighted
- Importance
- 2 / 10
- How much this matters relative to other rules.
- Confidence
- EMERGING
- Plausible and actively discussed, not yet well evidenced.
- Severity
- info
- How the finding is presented when it fails.
- Scoring
- Excluded
- Reported in the report, never penalised.
Impact is importance multiplied by the confidence tier’s weight — SPECIFICATION 1.0, RESEARCH 0.7, EMERGING 0.3, EXPERIMENTAL 0.1. Two rules backed by the same class of evidence therefore always carry the same weight, which is what makes the score reproducible rather than hand-tuned.
Questions about this rule
- Does AEO_DEFINITION_LIST affect my score?
- No. It is a detection rule: it runs, appears in your report and never penalises you. "Definitions use description lists" is information about the page rather than a defect - most pages are not expected to satisfy it.
- What does EMERGING confidence mean?
- Plausible and actively discussed, not yet well evidenced. Confidence is a declared tier rather than a per-rule number, so every rule backed by the same class of evidence carries the same weight - which is what makes the score reproducible instead of hand-tuned.
- How do I check AEO_DEFINITION_LIST on my own site?
- Paste your URL into the box above and it runs only this rule, usually in a couple of seconds. It is also included in the Answer Engine checker and in a full scan.
Tags
- aeo
- semantics
Related Answer Engine rules
- Overall question-answer coverageComposite signal: does the page give answer engines BOTH machine-readable Q&A (FAQPage schema) AND human-readable Q&A structure (question-formatted headings)? A page with neither is meaningfully worse than one with just one missing.AEO_QUESTION_ANSWER_COVERAGE
- FAQPage schema presentFAQPage JSON-LD gives answer engines a structured, unambiguous question/answer pair to cite directly.AEO_FAQ_SCHEMA
- Article schema presentArticle markup supplies headline, author and dates - the provenance an answer engine needs before citing a page.AEO_ARTICLE_SCHEMA
- Content declares an authorAuthorship is a direct input to how much weight an answer engine gives a claim, and is explicit in Google's quality guidance.AEO_AUTHOR_DECLARED
- Heading levels descend without skippingHeadings should step down one level at a time (h2 -> h3, not h2 -> h4). Skipped levels break the document outline that answer engines and screen readers use to understand which content belongs to which section.AEO_HEADING_HIERARCHY
- Page has a <main> landmarkA <main> element tells an extractor which part of the DOM is the content rather than navigation, ads and footer.AEO_SEMANTIC_MAIN