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.

All Fundamentals Technical SEO Content Links & authority Local SEO Measurement AI search & GEO Buying SEO

P

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

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.

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.

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.

W

White hat and black hat SEO

White hat SEO earns rankings within search engine guidelines; black hat SEO manipulates them through tactics the guidelines prohibit, accepting the risk of a penalty.