Every SEO term in plain English

Answer Engine Optimisation is the practice of structuring content so it is selected and cited by answer-first engines including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews.

An AI Overview is a generative summary shown at the top of a Google search results page, synthesised by Google's Gemini model from multiple ranking sources.

Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a hyperlink, and its wording signals to search engines what the linked page is about.

Attribution is the model that assigns credit for a conversion to one or more marketing touchpoints in the user's journey.

Average position is the mean SERP position a URL held for a query across all impressions in a given date range.

A backlink is a hyperlink on an external website that points to a page on your own domain, and is one of the strongest ranking signals in Google's algorithm.

A canonical tag is a link element that tells search engines which URL is the preferred version when the same or similar content appears at multiple URLs.

Cumulative Layout Shift measures how much the visible layout of a page moves unexpectedly during load, and should be under 0.1.

A content cluster is a group of interlinked pages that cover a broad topic together, with a central pillar page and multiple supporting pages targeting related sub-topics.

A content gap is a keyword or topic for which competitors rank but a target site does not, representing an unaddressed opportunity in the site's content strategy.

Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to a website who complete a defined goal, such as a purchase, sign-up, or lead form.

Core Web Vitals is a set of three page-experience metrics Google uses to measure loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability: LCP, INP, and CLS.

CPC is the average price an advertiser pays each time a user clicks a paid search ad triggered by a specific keyword.

Crawl budget is the number of URLs Googlebot can and will crawl on a website within a given time frame, determined by crawl capacity and crawl demand.

Click-through rate is the percentage of impressions that result in a click, calculated as clicks divided by impressions.

Domain Authority is a proprietary Moz metric on a 0-to-100 scale that predicts how likely a domain is to rank in search engine results.

Domain Rating is a proprietary Ahrefs metric on a 0-to-100 scale that measures the strength of a domain's backlink profile.

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, the framework Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines use to assess the credibility of content.

Entity SEO is the practice of optimising a brand or website's presence in search engines' entity graphs so it is correctly identified and disambiguated across queries.

A featured snippet is a boxed answer displayed at the top of a Google SERP that quotes text or a list from a ranking page.

Google Analytics 4 is Google's current web and app analytics platform, based on an event-driven data model that replaced the session-based Universal Analytics in July 2023.

Generative Engine Optimisation is a broader discipline than AEO, covering how content, brand entity, and technical signals influence generation by large language models across all AI surfaces.

Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that reports how a site appears in Google Search, including impressions, clicks, position, and indexing state.

The H1 is the top-level heading of a web page, marked with an h1 element, and should describe the page's primary topic in a single, unique headline.

hreflang is an HTML attribute that tells search engines which language and region a page targets, allowing them to serve the right version to the right audience.

An image pack is a SERP feature that displays a row or grid of images relevant to the query, sourced from Google Images.

An impression is recorded every time a link to your website appears in a user's search results, regardless of whether the user scrolls to see it.

Index coverage is the report in Google Search Console that shows which URLs on a site are indexed, which are excluded, and why.

Interaction to Next Paint measures how quickly a page responds to a user's interactions across the whole session, and should be under 200 milliseconds.

JavaScript SEO is the practice of ensuring content generated or modified by client-side JavaScript is discoverable, crawlable, and indexable by search engines.

Keyword cannibalisation is the condition in which two or more pages on the same domain compete for the same search query, splitting authority and confusing search engines.

Keyword difficulty is a 0-to-100 score that estimates how hard it is for a website to rank in the top ten organic results for a given search query.

Keyword intent is the classification of a search query by what the user is trying to accomplish, typically informational, navigational, commercial, or transactional.

A knowledge panel is a boxed summary that appears on the right side of a Google SERP with facts about a specific entity such as a person, company, or place.

Largest Contentful Paint is the time from navigation start until the largest visible element in the viewport has been rendered, and should be under 2.5 seconds.

Link velocity is the rate at which a website acquires or loses backlinks over time.

llms.txt is a plain-text file at the root of a domain that lists the site's key content and signals to LLM-based crawlers how the content should be discovered and used.

The local pack is a SERP feature that displays a map and three local business listings for queries with local intent.

The Model Context Protocol is an open standard developed by Anthropic for connecting LLM applications to external data sources and tools through a shared client-server interface.

A meta description is an HTML attribute that provides a short summary of a page, often used as the snippet displayed beneath the title in search results.

On-page SEO is the practice of optimising individual web pages so their content and HTML signals match what search engines expect for the queries they target.

Organic traffic is the volume of visitors that arrive at a website by clicking a non-paid search engine result.

People Also Ask is a SERP feature that shows a list of related questions the user might also want answered, each expanding to reveal an extracted answer.

Rank tracking is the practice of monitoring a website's position in search engine results for a defined set of keywords over time.

A referring domain is a unique external website that links to your site at least once, regardless of how many individual backlinks originate from it.

Rendering budget is the compute and time Googlebot allocates to executing JavaScript on a URL before falling back to the un-rendered HTML.

robots.txt is a plain-text file at the root of a domain that instructs crawlers which paths they are allowed or disallowed to fetch.

Schema markup is structured data written in the schema.org vocabulary that helps search engines understand a page and qualifies it for rich results.

Search volume is the average number of times a specific query is searched per month in a given country and language.

Semantic SEO is the practice of optimising content around meaning and topical relationships rather than exact-match keyword repetition.

A SERP is the page a search engine returns in response to a query, containing organic results, paid ads, and specialised features such as knowledge panels or AI Overviews.

A SERP feature is any non-standard element on a search results page beyond the classic ten blue links, such as a featured snippet, People Also Ask box, or local pack.

Search Generative Experience was Google's experimental AI-generated answer feature, launched in 2023 and superseded by AI Overviews in 2024.

Share of voice is the percentage of total organic search visibility a domain captures across a defined keyword set relative to its competitors.

Sitelinks are additional deep links displayed beneath a top-ranking organic result that let searchers jump directly to key sub-pages on the same site.

Structured data is standardised, machine-readable markup embedded in a web page that describes its content to search engines and other consumers.

A title tag is the HTML element that specifies the title of a web page, displayed in browser tabs and used as the clickable headline in most search results.

Top Stories is a SERP feature that displays a carousel of recent news articles for queries Google identifies as newsworthy.

Topic authority is a search engine's assessment of how comprehensively and expertly a site covers a subject area, influencing rankings across the whole topic.

A video carousel is a SERP feature that displays a horizontally scrollable row of video results, usually pulled from YouTube.

An XML sitemap is a file that lists a website's important URLs to help search engines discover and crawl them efficiently.