Glossary
SEO glossary
Plain definitions of the terms we use in audits, reports and calls. Each term has its own page with why it matters and how we handle it in a project.
All terms
AI Overviews
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AI Overviews are summaries written by Google’s AI and shown at the top of some search results. Each summary links to the pages it drew from.
Answer engine optimization (AEO)
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Answer engine optimization is the work of structuring content so that a search engine can use it as the direct answer to a question. The answer may appear as a featured snippet, in a "People also ask" box or in an AI Overview.
Backlink
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A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Search engines count backlinks from relevant, trusted sites as a sign that a page deserves to rank.
Canonical tag
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A canonical tag is a line in the HTML of a page that tells search engines which URL is the main version when several URLs show the same or very similar content.
Core Web Vitals
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Core Web Vitals are Google’s measurements of how a page loads and responds for real visitors. They cover loading speed, response to input and visual stability.
Crawl budget
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Crawl budget is the amount of crawling a search engine is willing to spend on a website in a given period. It depends on how fast the server responds and on how valuable the search engine thinks the pages are.
Featured snippet
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A featured snippet is a short answer that Google shows above the regular results, taken from one web page. It can be a paragraph, a list or a table.
Generative engine optimization (GEO)
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Generative engine optimization is the work of getting a brand mentioned and cited in answers written by AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Gemini. It is also called AI SEO.
Hreflang
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Hreflang is an HTML attribute that tells search engines which language and country a page is written for, and where the versions for other markets are.
Indexation
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Indexation is the step in which a search engine stores a page in its database, called the index. Only indexed pages can appear in search results.
Keyword cannibalization
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Keyword cannibalization happens when several pages on one site target the same search, so they compete with each other and none of them ranks as well as one page could.
llms.txt
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llms.txt is a plain text file at the root of a website that gives AI assistants a short summary of the site and links to its most important pages. It is a proposed convention, and AI companies have not committed to reading it.
Noindex
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Noindex is an instruction that tells search engines not to show a page in their results. It is set in a meta tag or in an HTTP header.
Off-page SEO
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Off-page SEO is everything that happens outside a website and affects how it ranks. In practice it means links from other sites and mentions of the brand.
On-page SEO
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On-page SEO is the work done on the pages of a website so that each one ranks for the search it should answer. It is also called on-site SEO.
Quality Score
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Quality Score is Google Ads’ rating, from 1 to 10, of how relevant a keyword, its ad and its landing page are to the person searching.
Sales-qualified lead (SQL)
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A sales-qualified lead is a contact that the sales team has accepted as a real opportunity, usually after a demo request or a conversation that confirms need and budget.
Schema markup
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Schema markup is code added to a page that describes its content in a format search engines read directly. It is also called structured data.
Search intent
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Search intent is the reason behind a search: what the person wants to find or do. A page ranks when it matches that reason.
Toxic backlink
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A toxic backlink is a link from a spam or low-quality site that can hurt a website’s rankings instead of helping them.
Next step
From terms to a plan
A definition tells you what a term means. An audit tells you whether it is a problem on your site. Our SEO audit services check each of these points against your own data and put the fixes in priority order.
You can also read how the terms fit together in our B2B SEO services, or see them at work in our case studies.
See how your site performs in search
Tell us what is happening with your search traffic. You get a straight answer on where we would start.