SEO & GEO glossary
71 definitions of the vocabulary you will hear in a pitch, an audit or a reporting meeting — from crawl budget to AI Overviews. Every entry answers the question first, then explains why it matters and what it changes in practice.
A
AI crawlers
AI crawlers are the bots that fetch web pages for AI companies — GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended — for training, for retrieval, or for both.
AI Overview
An AI Overview is a generated summary Google places above the organic results for some queries, citing a handful of sources. It absorbs a share of the clicks the first results used to receive.
Anchor text
Anchor text is the clickable words of a link. It tells search engines what the destination page is about, which makes it both a strong signal and a common source of over-optimisation.
Average position
Average position is the mean rank of a page or query across all its impressions. It is an average of very different situations and moves for reasons that are not always improvements.
B
Backlink
A backlink is a link from another site to yours. Links remain one of the strongest ranking signals because they are a costly, third-party endorsement.
Brand mention
A brand mention is a reference to a company by name without a link. Mentions help search engines and AI models build a consistent picture of an entity.
C
Canonical tag
A canonical tag tells search engines which URL is the preferred version of duplicate or near-duplicate pages, consolidating their ranking signals onto one address.
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)
CLS measures how much visible content moves unexpectedly while a page loads. Good is under 0.1. It is the metric users feel as tapping the wrong button.
Content pruning
Content pruning is the deliberate removal, merging or redirection of pages that attract no traffic and no links, to concentrate quality signals on what remains.
Conversion rate
Conversion rate is the share of visits that complete a defined goal — a purchase, a lead, a booking. In SEO it is what turns traffic into a business case.
Core update
A core update is a broad, periodic revision of how Google assesses quality and relevance across all queries. It re-sorts winners and losers without targeting any specific site.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are three field-measured user experience metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (loading), Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness) and Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability).
CPC (cost per click)
CPC is the price an advertiser pays for one click in a search auction. In SEO it is used as a proxy for the commercial value of a query.
Crawl budget
Crawl budget is the number of URLs a search engine is willing and able to fetch from a site in a given period. It only becomes a constraint on large or slow sites.
Crawling
Crawling is the process by which a search engine's robot discovers URLs and downloads their content, following links and sitemaps across the web.
CTR (click-through rate)
CTR is clicks divided by impressions. In organic search it depends on position, on what else occupies the result page, and on how compelling the title and snippet are.
D
Digital PR
Digital PR earns links and brand mentions by producing something journalists want to cover — original data, a study, a tool, a story — rather than by asking for placements.
Domain authority / rating
Domain authority scores are third-party metrics, typically 0-100, estimating a site's link strength. They are invented by tool vendors and used by nobody at Google.
Doorway page
A doorway page exists mainly to rank for a location or keyword variant and funnels every visitor to the same generic destination. Google's guidelines name it as a violation.
Duplicate content
Duplicate content is the same or near-identical content available at more than one URL. It is a consolidation problem, not usually a penalty.
E
E-E-A-T
E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust: the framework Google's quality raters use to judge content, and a useful proxy for what its systems reward.
Entity
An entity is a distinct thing a search engine or model recognises — a company, a person, a product, a place — independently of the words used to describe it.
F
Faceted navigation
Faceted navigation lets users filter a catalogue by attributes. Each combination can generate a URL, which is how a thousand-product site becomes millions of crawlable near-duplicates.
Featured snippet
A featured snippet is a passage lifted from a page and displayed above the organic results to answer a query directly, with attribution and a link.
G
GEO (generative engine optimization)
GEO is the practice of being found, trusted and quoted inside AI-generated answers — in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot or Google's AI Overviews — rather than ranked in a list of links.
Google Business Profile
A Google Business Profile is the free listing that represents a business on Google Search and Maps. It is a ranking asset, not a directory entry.
Google Search Console
Search Console is Google's free reporting tool for site owners: real impressions, clicks, positions, index coverage, Core Web Vitals and structured data status.
H
H1 and heading structure
Headings organise a page into a hierarchy: one H1 stating what the page is about, then H2s and H3s for its sections. They aid both accessibility and machine comprehension.
hreflang
hreflang is an annotation declaring that several URLs are the same page in different languages or regions, so search engines serve the right version to the right audience.
HTTP status code
A status code is the server's three-digit answer to a request: 200 for success, 301 and 302 for redirects, 404 for not found, 410 for gone, 5xx for server failures.
I
Impressions
An impression is counted when a page appears in search results for a query, whether or not anyone scrolled to it. It measures eligibility, not visibility.
Indexing
Indexing is a search engine's decision to store a crawled page and make it eligible to appear in results. A page that is not indexed cannot rank, whatever its quality.
INP (Interaction to Next Paint)
INP measures how quickly a page visually responds to user interactions across the whole visit. It replaced First Input Delay in March 2024. Good is under 200 milliseconds.
Internal linking
Internal linking is the network of links between a site's own pages. It distributes authority, defines hierarchy and is the cheapest ranking lever most sites never pull.
K
Keyword cannibalisation
Cannibalisation happens when several pages on a site compete for the same query, splitting links, impressions and relevance signals so that none of them ranks as well as one page would.
Keyword difficulty
Keyword difficulty is a tool-specific score, usually 0-100, estimating how hard it would be to rank on page one for a query — mostly derived from the backlink profiles of the pages already there.
Keyword research
Keyword research is the process of finding the queries a market actually types, estimating their demand and commercial value, and grouping them into the pages that will serve them.
L
LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)
LCP measures how long it takes for the largest visible element — usually a hero image, a video poster or a block of text — to render. Good is under 2.5 seconds.
Link scheme
A link scheme is any arrangement intended to manipulate rankings through links — buying them, exchanging them at scale, or building private networks. Google's spam policies prohibit it.
llms.txt
llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file at a site's root that summarises what the site is and lists its canonical entry points for large language models. It is a convention, not a standard.
Local citation
A citation is any online mention of a business's name, address and phone number — in directories, registries, association listings or the press — with or without a link.
Local pack (map pack)
The local pack is the block of three business listings with a map that appears for queries with local intent. It sits above the classic organic results and captures most of the local demand.
Log file analysis
Log file analysis reads the server's own record of every request to see exactly which URLs search engine crawlers fetched, how often, and what status codes they received.
Long-tail keyword
A long-tail keyword is a specific, low-volume query — usually three words or more — that faces less competition and converts far better than the broad head term it belongs to.
M
N
NAP consistency
NAP stands for name, address and phone number. Consistency across every listing helps search engines confirm which real-world business a mention refers to.
nofollow, sponsored, ugc
These link attributes tell search engines how to treat a link: nofollow for links you do not vouch for, sponsored for paid ones, ugc for user-generated content.
noindex
noindex is a directive, in a meta tag or an HTTP header, telling search engines not to keep a page in their index. The page must remain crawlable for the directive to be seen.
P
Pagination
Pagination splits a long list across numbered pages. Handled badly it hides most of a catalogue from crawlers; handled well it is a reliable discovery path.
Penalty (manual action)
A manual action is a human reviewer's decision to demote or remove pages that breach search engine guidelines. It appears in Search Console and requires a reconsideration request to lift.
R
Redirect (301, 302)
A redirect sends a request for one URL to another. A 301 signals a permanent move and consolidates signals; a 302 signals a temporary one and keeps the original indexed.
Referring domain
A referring domain is a unique website linking to yours, regardless of how many individual links it sends. It is the meaningful unit when measuring an authority profile.
Rendering (SSR, CSR, hydration)
Rendering is how HTML reaches the browser: built on the server (SSR), built in the browser by JavaScript (CSR), or pre-built at deploy time. It determines whether crawlers can see your content.
Retainer
A retainer is a recurring monthly fee for an ongoing SEO engagement. Its only meaningful measure is how many hours of what seniority it buys.
Review signals
Review signals are the volume, rating, recency and text of customer reviews. They influence local ranking, click-through and, increasingly, what AI assistants recommend.
Rich result
A rich result is an organic listing enhanced with extra detail drawn from structured data: review stars, prices, availability, event dates, recipes or breadcrumbs.
robots.txt
robots.txt is a file at the root of a domain that tells crawlers which paths they may request. It controls crawling, not indexing, and it is public.
S
Scope of work
The scope of work is the contractual list of what a provider will deliver, how often, and what is explicitly excluded. Vague scope is the single most common source of failed SEO engagements.
SEA (paid search)
SEA is advertising on search results, paid per click through an auction. It buys immediate visibility that stops the moment the budget stops.
Search intent
Search intent is the goal behind a query — to learn, to compare, to buy or to reach a specific site — and matching it is the single strongest predictor of whether a page ranks.
Search volume
Search volume is the estimated number of times a query is searched per month. Every third-party figure is a model with wide error bars, not a measurement.
SEO (search engine optimization)
SEO is the practice of earning visibility in the unpaid results of search engines by making a site technically accessible, genuinely useful and credibly referenced elsewhere on the web.
SEO audit
An SEO audit is a diagnostic of why a site under-performs in search, covering indexability, content, authority, experience and measurement, and ending in a prioritised list of fixes.
SERP (search engine results page)
A SERP is the page a search engine returns for a query. Modern SERPs mix organic links with ads, featured snippets, map packs, shopping carousels and AI-generated answers.
SERP features
SERP features are the non-standard result blocks a search engine inserts: featured snippets, People Also Ask, image and video packs, map packs, shopping carousels and AI Overviews.
Site migration
A migration is any change to a site's domain, URL structure, platform or content organisation. It is the highest-risk event in SEO and the most often under-planned.
Structured data (schema.org)
Structured data is machine-readable markup, usually JSON-LD following schema.org vocabulary, that states what a page is about: a product, an article, an organisation, an FAQ.
T
Title tag
The title tag is the page's headline in the HTML head. It is the strongest on-page relevance signal and the text most often used as the clickable link in results.
Topical authority
Topical authority is the depth and coherence of a site's coverage of a subject. Covering a topic comprehensively, and linking that coverage together, helps every page in the cluster.