Every term, defined properly

301 redirect

Permanent redirect

A server-side permanent redirect that tells crawlers a URL has moved for good and that ranking signals should consolidate on the destination.

302 redirect

Found · Temporary redirect

A temporary redirect indicating the resource lives elsewhere for now; the original URL is expected to remain the canonical one.

307 redirect

Temporary Redirect

A temporary redirect that, unlike 302, guarantees the HTTP method and body are preserved; also the code browsers report for internal HSTS redirects.

308 redirect

Permanent Redirect

A permanent redirect equivalent to 301 for indexing purposes, but which forbids changing the HTTP method when following it.

Affiliate SEO

Affiliate marketing SEO

Earning search traffic for content monetised through affiliate commissions; permitted by Google when the content adds substantial original value.

Agency retainer models

Engagement models

The commercial structures used for SEO services: monthly retainers, project fees, day rates, performance-based arrangements or hybrids.

Agentic browsing

AI agents · Autonomous agents

AI systems that navigate websites on a user's behalf — reading pages, filling forms, comparing options and sometimes completing transactions.

AI content licensing

Publisher AI deals

Commercial agreements in which publishers license their content to AI companies for training, retrieval or attribution, as an alternative to blocking crawlers.

AI crawler

AI bot · LLM crawler

An automated agent operated by an AI company to fetch web content for model training, search indexing, or live retrieval when answering a user's question.

AI Mode

Google's conversational search experience for complex, multi-part questions, returning a reasoned AI response with supporting links instead of a classic result list.

AI Overviews

AIO · SGE

Google's AI-generated summaries shown at the top of many search results, synthesising information from multiple web pages with links to the sources.

AI referral traffic

LLM referrals

Visits arriving from AI assistants and answer engines, identifiable in analytics by referrer hosts such as chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, claude.ai and copilot.microsoft.com.

AI visibility

AI search visibility

The extent to which a brand appears, is cited, or is recommended across AI-generated answers, measured by sampling prompts rather than by rank positions.

AI-generated content policy

Generative AI content

Google's position that content is judged on quality and purpose, not method of production — but mass-produced AI content made to game rankings is spam.

Algorithm volatility

SERP volatility · Ranking flux

Day-to-day fluctuation in rankings caused by continuous algorithm changes, index updates and testing, distinct from confirmed named updates.

Alt text

Alternative text

The alt attribute describing an image's content and function for screen readers, for cases where the image fails to load, and for image search.

Anchor text

Link text

The visible, clickable text of a hyperlink, used by search engines as a description of the destination page.

Answer engine

AI search engine

A system that responds to a question with a synthesised answer and citations rather than a ranked list of documents — for example Perplexity, ChatGPT search or Google's AI…

Answer Engine Optimization

AEO

Optimising content to be the source of a direct answer in features and assistants that answer questions rather than list links.

Assisted conversions

Path contribution

Conversions in which a channel appeared somewhere in the path but was not the final touchpoint before conversion.

Attribution

Attribution modelling

Assigning credit for a conversion across the touchpoints that preceded it, using rules such as last click, first click, or data-driven models.

Author authority

Author E-E-A-T · Bylines

The credibility a named author brings to content, evidenced by verifiable expertise, publication history and presence across trusted sources.

Automatic locale redirection

IP-based redirects · Language detection

Redirecting users to a country or language version based on IP address or browser settings, a pattern Google warns can prevent crawling of other versions.

Average position

Search Console's mean of the highest position a site achieved for each impression of a query, averaged across those impressions.

AVIF

AV1 Image File Format

A modern image format based on the AV1 codec that generally compresses better than WebP, with wide but slightly less universal browser support.

Backlink

Inbound link · External link

A hyperlink from one website to another, historically the strongest external signal search engines use to judge a page's importance and relevance.

BERT

Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers

A transformer language model Google applied to search from 2019, improving understanding of word order, prepositions and context within queries and passages.

Bing Webmaster Tools

BWT

Microsoft's free webmaster platform for Bing, offering search performance data, index explorer, site scan, IndexNow submission and URL inspection.

Brand mention monitoring

Mention tracking

Tracking where a brand is named across the web and inside AI answers, including whether the description is accurate and the sentiment favourable.

Brand search

Branded queries

Searches containing a company or product name, which behave differently from non-brand queries and should always be reported separately.

Breadcrumb navigation

BreadcrumbList

A secondary navigation trail showing a page's position in the site hierarchy; with BreadcrumbList markup it can replace the URL line in search results.

Broken link building

Finding dead outbound links on third-party pages and suggesting your equivalent resource as a replacement.

Business categories

GBP categories · Primary category

The classification assigned to a Google Business Profile, with one primary and up to nine secondary categories, strongly determining which searches it can appear for.

Business Profile suspension

GBP suspension

Google disabling a business listing for policy violations such as a fake address, keyword-stuffed name, ineligible business type or prohibited category.

Cache-Control

Caching headers

The HTTP header governing how browsers, CDNs and proxies store and revalidate a response, using directives such as max-age, s-maxage and stale-while-revalidate.

Canonicalization

Duplicate consolidation

The process by which a search engine groups duplicate or near-duplicate URLs into a cluster and picks one representative URL to index and rank.

Cart and checkout exclusion

Transactional page exclusion

Keeping cart, checkout, account and order confirmation URLs out of the index, since they have no search value and can leak session data.

Category page content

Category copy

Editorial content on a product listing page that helps buyers choose, as distinct from keyword-stuffed text appended below the product grid.

Causal impact analysis

Interrupted time series · CausalImpact

A statistical method that estimates the effect of an intervention by forecasting what would have happened without it, using control series as a counterfactual.

ccTLD

Country code top-level domain

A top-level domain assigned to a country or territory, such as .de or .fr, which carries an inherent and unchangeable geo-targeting signal.

ChatGPT-User

User-triggered fetcher

OpenAI's agent that fetches a specific page in real time because a user or an agentic task requested it, rather than for indexing or training.

Chrome User Experience Report

CrUX · Field data

Google's public dataset of real-user performance measurements from opted-in Chrome users, and the official source of Core Web Vitals assessment.

Chunk retrieval

Passage retrieval

Retrieving individual segments of a document rather than whole pages, which is how most AI search and RAG systems select what to feed a model.

Citation share

Source share

The proportion of AI answer citations across a tracked prompt set that point to a given domain, used as the AI-era analogue of ranking share.

ClaudeBot

Claude-Web · Claude-User · Claude-SearchBot

Anthropic's family of web crawlers and fetchers, including a general crawler and agents that retrieve pages for search results and for individual user requests.

Click-through rate

CTR

Clicks divided by impressions, expressed as a percentage; in search it measures how compelling a result is at the position and in the SERP context it occupies.

Cloaking

Presenting different content or URLs to search engines than to users with the intent to manipulate rankings; a Google spam policy violation.

Co-citation and co-occurrence

The pattern of two entities being mentioned or linked together by third parties, which helps search engines infer that they are related.

Commercial investigation intent

Commercial intent

Queries from users comparing options before buying — 'best', 'vs', 'alternatives', 'review' — sitting between informational and transactional intent.

Competitive analysis

Competitor research

Comparing a site's search position against competitors across visibility, content coverage, authority and technical capability to locate realistic opportunities.

Compression (gzip, Brotli, Zstandard)

Content-Encoding

Encoding text responses to reduce transfer size; Brotli typically beats gzip on HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with Zstandard now also supported by browsers.

Consent management and Consent Mode

CMP · Consent Mode v2

Systems for capturing and honouring users' tracking permissions, and Google's mechanism for adjusting tag behaviour and modelling gaps when consent is withheld.

Content audit

Content inventory

A systematic review of every page on a site against performance, quality and business value criteria, producing a keep/improve/merge/remove decision per URL.

Content brief

SEO brief

A specification given to a writer covering the target query set, intent, required subtopics, angle, sources, internal links and success criteria.

Content decay

Traffic decay

The gradual decline in a page's search traffic as it ages, competitors update, intent shifts or the underlying information goes out of date.

Content Delivery Network

CDN

A distributed network of edge servers that caches and serves content close to users, reducing latency and offloading the origin.

Content pruning

Content consolidation

Systematically removing, merging or noindexing low-value pages so a site's indexed footprint reflects only content worth ranking.

Content refresh

Content update

Substantively updating an existing page — new data, corrected facts, restructured sections — to restore or improve its relevance and rankings.

Content syndication

Republishing

Republishing the same content on third-party sites for reach; without correct canonicalisation it creates duplicates that can outrank the original.

Context window

Context length

The maximum amount of text a language model can consider at once, which bounds how much retrieved content can be supplied when generating an answer.

Conversion rate

CVR

The proportion of sessions or users that complete a defined goal, such as a purchase, lead form submission or sign-up.

Core update

Broad core algorithm update

A significant, broad change to Google's ranking systems, announced in advance and rolled out over one to several weeks, typically a few times a year.

Core Web Vitals

CWV

Google's set of three field-measured user experience metrics — LCP, INP and CLS — used as part of the page experience signals in ranking.

Crawl budget

The number of URLs a search engine is willing and able to crawl on a site in a given period, set by crawl capacity limit and crawl demand.

Crawl demand

How much a search engine wants to crawl a set of URLs, driven by their popularity, how often they change, and the site's perceived overall quality.

Crawl rate limit

Crawl capacity limit

The maximum simultaneous connections and fetch frequency a crawler will use for a host, adjusted automatically based on server response times and errors.

Crawl trap

Infinite space · Spider trap

A URL pattern that generates effectively unlimited unique URLs, causing crawlers to loop indefinitely and exhaust crawl budget.

Crawled — currently not indexed

A Search Console status meaning Google fetched a URL but chose not to index it, usually a quality, duplication or value judgement.

Crawling

Spidering

The process by which a search engine discovers URLs and downloads their content using automated software, before any indexing or ranking happens.

Cumulative Layout Shift

CLS

A Core Web Vital scoring unexpected visual movement of page content, computed from the largest burst of layout shifts; good is 0.1 or less at p75.

Data sampling and thresholding

Sampling

Analytics platforms estimating results from a subset of data, or suppressing small values for privacy, both of which distort reporting if unnoticed.

data-nosnippet

An HTML attribute that excludes a specific span, div or section of a page from being used in Google's snippets while leaving the rest eligible.

Deduplication system

Duplicate filtering

Google's system for ensuring results are not dominated by near-identical pages, filtering duplicates so users see a varied set of sources.

Digital PR

SEO PR

Earning editorial coverage and links from media outlets through newsworthy assets — original data, expert commentary, campaigns — rather than link placement.

Disavow links tool

Disavow file

A Search Console tool for asking Google to ignore specified inbound links or domains, intended for sites with a link-related manual action or known paid links.

Discontinued product handling

End-of-life products

The policy for permanently retired products: keep as an archive page, redirect to a genuine successor, or return 404/410 — chosen by whether an equivalent exists.

Discovered — currently not indexed

A Search Console status meaning Google knows a URL exists but has not crawled it yet, typically because of crawl capacity or low crawl demand.

Discussions and forums

Forum results

A SERP feature surfacing threads from forums, Q&A sites and social communities, supported by DiscussionForumPosting and QAPage structured data.

DOM (Document Object Model)

Rendered HTML

The in-memory tree representation of a document that the browser builds from HTML and mutates with JavaScript; the rendered DOM is what search engines index.

Doorway pages

Gateway pages · Bridge pages

Pages or sites created to rank for many similar queries and funnel users to a single destination, providing no unique value themselves.

Duplicate content

Substantively identical or near-identical content available at more than one URL, within a site or across sites.

Dynamic rendering

Serving a server-rendered HTML version to crawlers and a client-rendered version to users; Google now describes it as a deprecated workaround.

E-E-A-T

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness · EAT

The framework in Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines for assessing page quality: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, with Trust at the centre.

Ecommerce SEO

Retail SEO

Search optimisation for online retail, dominated by catalogue scale, faceted URL control, product data accuracy and the interaction between organic results and shopping…

Edge SEO

Implementing SEO changes in CDN edge workers rather than the origin application, so fixes ship without touching the main codebase or release cycle.

Editorial guidelines

Editorial policy

A published statement of how a publisher sources, reviews, corrects and discloses its content, supporting trust for readers, raters and AI systems.

Embedding

Vector embedding

A numerical vector representing the meaning of text, an image or another item, positioned so that semantically similar items lie close together in the vector space.

Engagement rate

Engaged sessions

The share of sessions that lasted over ten seconds, had a conversion event, or included at least two pageviews — GA4's replacement for bounce rate.

Entity

Named entity

A distinct, uniquely identifiable thing — a person, place, organisation, product or concept — that a search engine can reason about independently of the words used to name it.

ETag and conditional requests

If-None-Match · If-Modified-Since

A validator token identifying a specific version of a resource, allowing clients and crawlers to revalidate with a cheap 304 Not Modified response.

Evergreen content

Content whose relevance persists over time, as opposed to news or seasonal pieces, though it still requires periodic maintenance to stay accurate.

Exact-match domain system

EMD

Google's system preventing low-quality sites from ranking merely because their domain name matches a query, introduced as an update in 2012.

Expired domain abuse

Domain resurrection

Buying an expired domain and repurposing it to host unrelated low-value content in order to inherit its accumulated ranking signals.

Faceted navigation

Filtered navigation · Facets

Filter and sort controls on listing pages that can generate a combinatorial explosion of crawlable URLs from a small product set.

FAQ and HowTo rich result deprecation

FAQ rich results removal

Google's 2023 change restricting FAQ rich results to well-known authoritative government and health sites and removing HowTo rich results entirely.

Featured snippet

Position zero · Answer box

A block at or near the top of Google's results that quotes an extracted answer from a page, with a link to the source.

First Contentful Paint

FCP

The time from navigation start until the browser renders the first piece of DOM content; a diagnostic metric rather than a Core Web Vital.

First Input Delay

FID

The retired responsiveness Core Web Vital measuring only the delay before the browser began processing a page's first interaction; replaced by INP in March 2024.

Freshness systems (QDF)

Query Deserves Freshness

Google's systems that boost recent content for queries where recency matters, such as breaking news, sports scores or evolving topics.

Generative AI performance report

Search Console AI report

Search Console views introduced in 2026 showing impressions and clicks for a site's links inside Google's generative AI features on Search and Discover.

Generative Engine Optimization

GEO

The practice of improving how often and how accurately a brand's content is retrieved, cited and represented in AI-generated answers.

Geo-targeting

International targeting

Signalling which country a site or section is intended for, through ccTLD choice, hreflang region codes, server location, local links and language.

Google Analytics 4

GA4

Google's event-based analytics platform, which replaced Universal Analytics in July 2023 and models sessions and users from event streams.

Google Business Profile

GBP · Google My Business

The free business listing that powers a company's presence in Google Maps, the local pack and business panels, renamed from Google My Business in 2021.

Google Content Warehouse API leak

Google API leak · 2024 documentation leak

The May 2024 publication of thousands of internal Google Search API documentation attributes, which named ranking-related features not previously disclosed.

Google Merchant Center

Merchant Center Next

Google's platform for submitting product data, powering Shopping ads and free product listings across Search, Images and the Shopping tab.

Google News sitemap

News sitemap

A specialised sitemap containing only articles published in the last two days, using the news namespace to speed discovery for Google News and Top stories.

Google ranking systems

Ranking systems guide

Google's documented list of the systems that generate rankings, distinguished from one-off 'updates' to those systems, and including retired ones.

Google Search Console

GSC · Webmaster Tools

Google's free property-level reporting and diagnostics service covering search performance, indexing status, enhancements, manual actions and security issues.

Google spam policies

Webmaster spam policies

Google's documented list of behaviours that can cause lower rankings or removal, covering cloaking, doorways, hacked content, keyword stuffing, link spam, scraped content…

Google-Extended

A robots.txt control token that governs whether a site's content can be used to improve Gemini models and grounded Gemini API responses, without affecting Google Search.

Googlebot

Google crawler

Google's main web crawler, which fetches pages for Google Search using two user agents: Googlebot Smartphone and Googlebot Desktop.

GPTBot

OpenAI's crawler used to collect publicly available web content that may be used to improve future models; controllable via robots.txt.

Grounding

Search grounding

Constraining a language model's output to information retrieved from a specified source — a search index, a document set or a database — so answers can be attributed and…

Guest posting

Guest blogging · Contributed articles

Writing articles for other publications; legitimate as an audience and authority tactic, but a link spam violation when done at scale primarily for keyword-rich links.

Hallucination

Confabulation

A confident, fluent but factually wrong or fabricated statement produced by a language model, including invented citations, prices, features or quotes.

Heading structure (H1-H6)

H1 · Headings

The hierarchy of HTML heading elements that conveys a document's outline to users, assistive technology and parsers.

Helpful content system and updates

HCU

A Google system launched in August 2022 to demote sites with a high proportion of content made for search engines, integrated into core ranking with the March 2024 core…

Helpful, reliable, people-first content

Helpful content

Google's stated content standard: content created primarily for people, that demonstrates first-hand expertise and leaves readers feeling their need was met.

hreflang

rel=alternate hreflang

An annotation declaring alternate language or regional versions of a page, so search engines serve the appropriate one to each user.

hreflang x-default

x-default

The hreflang value marking the fallback page for users whose language or region does not match any specified alternate.

HSTS

HTTP Strict Transport Security

A response header instructing browsers to only contact a host over HTTPS for a set period, eliminating the initial insecure request.

HTTP status codes

Response codes

Numeric codes in an HTTP response that tell crawlers how to treat a URL: 200 index it, 3xx follow the redirect, 404/410 drop it, 5xx come back later.

HTTP/2

h2

A binary, multiplexed version of HTTP that carries many concurrent requests over one TCP connection with header compression.

HTTP/3

QUIC

The version of HTTP that runs over QUIC on UDP, removing transport-level head-of-line blocking and speeding up connection setup.

HTTPS

TLS · SSL

HTTP over TLS, encrypting traffic between browser and server; a lightweight Google ranking signal since 2014 and a baseline expectation today.

Hummingbird

Google's 2013 rewrite of its core ranking infrastructure, shifting emphasis from individual keywords toward the meaning of whole queries.

Hydration

Rehydration

Attaching client-side JavaScript behaviour to server-rendered HTML so a static page becomes interactive.

Image and video sitemap extensions

Image sitemap · Video sitemap

Namespace extensions to XML sitemaps that declare images and videos associated with a page so they can be discovered for Images and Video search.

Image pack

Image results block

A horizontal or grid block of image results embedded within the web SERP, linking through to Google Images.

Impressions

In Search Console, the number of times a site's links appeared in results for a query, counted when the link is scrolled or expanded into view.

In-house vs agency

Resourcing model

The choice between building an internal SEO team, retaining an external agency or consultant, or operating a hybrid of both.

Incrementality testing

Lift testing

Measuring the additional outcomes caused by an activity, by comparing a treated group against an untreated control, rather than inferring causation from attribution.

Indented results

Nested results · Multiple results from one site

A layout where a second result from the same site appears indented under the first, indicating Google judged both relevant to the query.

Index bloat

A condition where a site has far more URLs indexed or crawlable than it has genuinely useful pages, diluting crawl attention and site-level quality signals.

Indexing

Index selection

Storing and organising a crawled page in a search engine's index so it becomes eligible to be retrieved and ranked for queries.

IndexNow

An open protocol for pushing URL change notifications to participating search engines, adopted by Microsoft Bing, Yandex, Seznam and Naver.

Infinite scroll

Endless scrolling

A UI pattern that appends more items as the user scrolls; without backing paginated URLs the additional items are usually invisible to crawlers.

Information gain

Novel information

The amount of genuinely new information a document adds beyond what the user has already seen in other results for the same query.

Interaction to Next Paint

INP

A Core Web Vital measuring overall responsiveness as the latency of the worst (approximately) interaction on a page; good is 200 ms or less at p75.

Internal linking

Internal links

Links between pages on the same site, which control crawl paths, distribute link equity, and communicate topical relationships and page importance.

International SEO

Global SEO

Structuring and optimising a site so the right language and country version is served to the right audience in each market's search results.

Internationalised domain name

IDN · Punycode

A domain name containing non-ASCII characters, encoded for DNS as ASCII Punycode beginning with `xn--`.

Intrusive interstitial

Pop-up penalty

A pop-up or overlay that obscures the main content immediately after a user arrives from search, which Google's guidance discourages on mobile.

JavaScript rendering

JavaScript SEO

The execution of a page's client-side JavaScript by a search engine so that content and links generated at runtime become indexable.

Journalist sourcing platforms

HARO · Connectively · Qwoted · Featured

Services that connect journalists seeking expert sources with people willing to comment, historically a route to earning media links and citations.

JSON-LD

JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data

A W3C-standard JSON syntax for linked data, embedded in a `<script type="application/ld+json">` block; Google's recommended structured data format.

Keyword cannibalisation

Cannibalization

Multiple pages on a site competing for the same query, so search engines alternate between them and none establishes a strong position.

Keyword difficulty

KD · Competition score

A vendor-specific 0-100 score estimating how hard it is to rank on page one for a query, usually derived from the link profiles of current top results.

Keyword research

Query research

Identifying and prioritising the queries a business should target, using volume, difficulty, intent, business value and current visibility.

Knowledge cutoff

Training cutoff

The date after which a language model has no training data, so anything more recent is unknown to it unless supplied through retrieval.

Knowledge Graph

KG

Google's database of entities and the relationships between them, used to disambiguate queries, power knowledge panels and ground generative answers.

Knowledge panel

Entity panel

An information box about an entity — person, organisation, place, work — assembled from the Knowledge Graph and shown beside or above results.

Largest Contentful Paint

LCP

A Core Web Vital measuring the render time of the largest image, video poster or text block visible in the viewport; good is 2.5 s or less at p75.

Lazy loading

Deferred loading

Deferring the download of offscreen images and iframes until they are near the viewport, using the native `loading="lazy"` attribute or IntersectionObserver.

Lighthouse

An open-source automated auditing tool in Chrome DevTools and PageSpeed Insights that runs lab tests for performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO.

Link building

Link acquisition · Link earning

The practice of acquiring links from other websites, ranging from editorially earned citations to schemes that violate Google's link spam policy.

Link equity

Link juice · Authority flow

The ranking value passed through a hyperlink, influenced by the linking page's own authority, its relevance, its number of outbound links and the link's attributes.

Link farm

Link network · Link wheel

A group of sites that link to each other extensively for the sole purpose of inflating link counts, with no editorial reason for the links.

Link graph

Web graph

The network of all pages as nodes and hyperlinks as edges, over which link-based ranking algorithms such as PageRank are computed.

Link profile

Backlink profile

The aggregate characteristics of all links pointing to a site: source diversity, anchor text distribution, follow ratio, topical relevance and acquisition pattern over time.

Link reclamation

Broken backlink recovery

Recovering link equity that a site already earned but lost, usually because linked URLs now 404, redirect poorly, or were dropped in a migration.

Link spam

Link schemes

Google's spam policy category covering links intended to manipulate rankings: buying or selling links, excessive exchanges, automated link creation and low-quality directory…

Link velocity

Link growth rate

The rate at which a site or page acquires new backlinks over time; abrupt, unexplained spikes are a common signature of manipulation.

Linkable asset

Link bait

Content designed to earn links on its own merit — original research, free tools, definitive references, interactive data — rather than through solicitation.

LLM Optimization

LLMO · AI SEO

A loosely used umbrella term for making a brand and its content well-represented in large language model outputs, whether from retrieval or from training data.

llms.txt

A proposed Markdown file at a site's root listing its most important content for language models; a community convention, not a standard, and not used by Google Search.

Local citations

Business listings

Mentions of a business's name, address and phone on third-party sites such as directories, industry bodies, chambers of commerce and data aggregators.

Local grid rank tracking

Geo-grid tracking · Local Falcon-style grids

Measuring local pack rankings from many simulated points across a map to reveal how visibility varies by searcher location.

Local landing pages

Location pages

Pages on a business's own site dedicated to a specific location or service area, supporting both localised organic rankings and the business profile.

Local pack

Map pack · 3-pack · Local finder

A map with typically three local business listings shown for queries with local intent, drawn from Google Business Profile data rather than web pages.

Local search updates (Pigeon, Possum, Vicinity)

Pigeon · Possum · Vicinity update

Informally named updates that shaped local ranking: Pigeon (2014) tied local results to web signals, Possum (2016) changed filtering, Vicinity (2021) raised proximity's…

Local SEO

Local search optimisation

Optimising a business's visibility for geographically constrained searches, across both the map pack and localised organic results.

LocalBusiness structured data

LocalBusiness schema

Schema.org markup describing a physical business — address, geo coordinates, opening hours, phone, price range — placed on the relevant location page.

Log file analysis

Server log analysis

Examining raw server access logs to see exactly which URLs crawlers fetched, how often, with what status codes and response times.

Long-tail keyword

Long tail

A specific, low-volume query, usually longer and more precise, that collectively with millions of others makes up the majority of search demand.

Manual action

Manual penalty

A demotion or removal applied by a human reviewer at Google for a spam policy violation, reported in Search Console with a reconsideration process.

Marketplace SEO

Amazon SEO · Platform SEO

Optimising listings within marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay or Etsy, whose internal search engines rank on relevance, conversion and sales velocity rather than links.

Medic update

August 2018 core update

The industry nickname for Google's August 2018 broad core update, which had pronounced effects on health, medical and other YMYL sites.

Merchant listing experiences

Product rich results

Google result types for pages where a product can be bought directly, requiring Product markup with offer details such as price, currency and availability.

Meta description

A page-level summary in a `<meta name="description">` tag, used as a candidate for the search snippet but not as a ranking factor.

Meta refresh redirect

Client-side redirect

A redirect implemented with `<meta http-equiv="refresh">` in the HTML; Google understands it but recommends server-side redirects instead.

Microdata

An HTML attribute-based syntax (itemscope, itemtype, itemprop) for embedding structured data directly in visible markup.

Mixed content

Insecure http subresources loaded by an https page; browsers block active mixed content and may upgrade or block passive content.

Mobile-first indexing

Google's practice of crawling, indexing and ranking based on the mobile version of a page; completed for all sites by mid-2024.

Model Context Protocol

MCP

An open protocol standardising how AI applications connect to external tools and data sources, letting assistants query systems directly rather than scraping interfaces.

Model training opt-out

AI training controls

Mechanisms by which a publisher signals that its content should not be used to train AI models, principally robots.txt tokens and contractual or technical blocking.

Multi-location SEO

Multi-site local

Managing local search presence across many branches, franchises or practitioners, at a scale where consistency and governance become the main challenge.

Multilingual SEO

Multi-language SEO

Optimising a site that serves several languages, ensuring each version is fully indexable, correctly annotated and not mixed within a single page.

Multilingual sitemaps

Sitemap hreflang

XML sitemaps carrying `xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang` annotations, an alternative to placing hreflang in page head markup.

MUM

Multitask Unified Model

Google's multimodal, multilingual model announced in 2021, able to transfer knowledge across languages and formats to answer complex comparative questions.

NAP consistency

Name, Address, Phone

Keeping a business's name, address and phone number identical across its website, business profile and third-party directories.

Navboost

A Google ranking component, described in United States antitrust testimony, that uses aggregated historical click and query data to adjust rankings.

Near me search

Implicit local intent

Queries with local intent, whether stated explicitly with 'near me' or inferred from the query and the searcher's location.

Negative SEO

Attempts to damage a competitor's rankings, typically by pointing spam links at their site, scraping their content, or fabricating removal requests.

Neural matching

A Google system that uses neural networks to understand how queries relate to page concepts, bridging vocabulary gaps between what users type and how pages are written.

noindex

A robots directive, delivered by meta tag or X-Robots-Tag header, that instructs search engines to drop a page from their index.

nosnippet / max-snippet

Snippet controls

Robots directives controlling whether and how much of a page's text a search engine may show as a snippet or use in generated summaries.

OAI-SearchBot

OpenAI's crawler that builds the search index used to surface and link websites in ChatGPT search results; distinct from the training crawler GPTBot.

Organic TAM

Total addressable search demand

The total search demand a business could theoretically address, expressed as the aggregate volume or click potential of all relevant queries in its markets.

Original content system

Original reporting

Google's system for surfacing original reporting and source content more prominently than the derivative coverage that follows it.

Orphan page

A page with no internal links pointing to it, reachable only via sitemap, external link or direct URL.

Out-of-stock handling

Stock availability

How a site treats product pages when items are temporarily unavailable — keeping them live with accurate availability rather than removing or redirecting them.

Page experience

Google's umbrella term for signals about how users perceive interacting with a page, including Core Web Vitals, HTTPS and absence of intrusive interstitials.

PageRank

PR

Google's original link-analysis algorithm, which scores a page's importance by the number and importance of pages linking to it, computed recursively.

PageSpeed Insights

PSI

Google's public tool that shows CrUX field data and a Lighthouse lab audit for a URL and its origin, side by side.

Pagination

Paginated series

Splitting a long list or article across sequential URLs; Google stopped using rel=next/prev for indexing in 2019 and treats each page independently.

Panda

Farmer update

Google's 2011 quality algorithm targeting thin, duplicated and low-value content, later folded into the core ranking algorithm and now retired as a named system.

Parasite SEO

Rented authority

The practitioner term for ranking content on someone else's high-authority domain instead of your own, now largely covered by Google's site reputation abuse policy.

Passage ranking

Passage indexing · Passage-based ranking

Google's ability to rank a page based on the relevance of a specific passage within it, even when the page overall is about something broader.

Penguin

Webspam update

Google's link spam algorithm launched in 2012; since version 4.0 in 2016 it runs in real time within the core algorithm and devalues spam links rather than penalising sites.

People Also Ask

PAA · Related questions

An expandable set of related questions on the SERP, each revealing a snippet-style answer drawn from a web page, with more questions appended as users expand.

PerplexityBot

Perplexity-User

Perplexity's crawler for building its search index, alongside a separate user-triggered agent that fetches pages in response to specific requests.

Pillar page

Hub page · Ultimate guide

A broad, comprehensive page that introduces a whole topic and links out to detailed supporting pages within the same cluster.

Preferred Sources

A Google Search feature letting users select news outlets they want to see more prominently in Top stories and a dedicated section of results.

Prefetch and speculation rules

rel=prefetch · Prerender

Hints that fetch or fully prepare resources for a likely next navigation at low priority, making the subsequent page load feel instant.

Preload

rel=preload

A resource hint that tells the browser to fetch a critical resource for the current page at high priority, before the parser would normally discover it.

Prerendering

Static prerendering

Generating and caching a fully rendered HTML snapshot of a JavaScript page at build time or on request, so crawlers receive complete markup.

Price and offer markup

Offer schema · priceSpecification

Structured data stating a product's price, currency, availability and validity, required for merchant listing eligibility and used in price displays.

Private blog network

PBN

A set of websites, often built on expired domains, controlled by one party for the purpose of passing links to money sites; a clear link spam violation.

Product detail page

PDP

The page for an individual product, carrying its description, images, price, availability, reviews and Product structured data.

Product feed

Data feed · Shopping feed

A structured file or API supplying product attributes — id, title, description, price, availability, GTIN, images — to shopping platforms and marketplaces.

Product listing page

PLP · Category page

A page listing multiple products, such as a category, collection or filtered view; usually the highest-value organic template on a retail site.

Product variant handling

Variants · SKU consolidation

Deciding whether product variations such as colour or size get their own indexable URLs or are consolidated onto one canonical product page.

Programmatic SEO

pSEO · Scaled page generation

Generating large numbers of pages from structured data against templated query patterns, such as 'flights from X to Y' or '[job] salary in [city]'.

Progressive enhancement

A build strategy that starts with working HTML and layers on CSS and JavaScript, so core content and navigation function without scripts.

Prompt volume

Prompt research

An estimate of how often a given question or prompt is asked of AI assistants — a nascent, poorly measured analogue of search volume.

Proximity

Distance · Searcher location

The physical distance between the searcher and a business, one of the three factors Google names for local ranking and often the most decisive.

Query fan-out

Query decomposition

The technique in AI search of breaking one complex user question into many related sub-queries, running them in parallel, and synthesising the results.

Rank tracking

Position tracking · Rank monitoring

Regularly querying search engines from defined locations and devices to record where specific URLs rank for a keyword set.

RankBrain

Google's first machine-learning ranking system, introduced in 2015, which helps interpret how queries relate to concepts, especially unfamiliar ones.

RDFa

RDFa Lite

A W3C attribute syntax (vocab, typeof, property) for embedding RDF-based structured data in HTML; supported by Google but rarely used for new work.

Readability

Reading level

How easily a reader can understand a text, influenced by sentence length, vocabulary, structure and formatting; not a direct ranking factor.

Reciprocal links

Link exchange

Two sites linking to each other; unremarkable when it reflects a real relationship, a link spam violation when exchanges are excessive or systematic.

Redirect chain

Redirect hop · Redirect loop

A sequence of two or more redirects between the requested URL and the final destination; each hop adds latency and risks signals being lost.

Referring domains

Linking root domains · RDs

The number of unique domains linking to a site or page, generally a more meaningful measure of link popularity than raw backlink count.

rel="canonical"

Canonical tag · Canonical link element

A link annotation (in the head or an HTTP header) that tells search engines which URL you consider the preferred version of duplicate content.

rel="nofollow"

nofollow

A link attribute telling search engines not to pass ranking credit through a link; since 2019 Google treats it as a hint rather than a directive.

rel="sponsored"

Sponsored link attribute

A link attribute introduced by Google in 2019 to identify links created as part of advertising, sponsorships or other compensation agreements.

rel="ugc"

User-generated content link attribute

A link attribute marking links that originate in user-generated content such as comments, forum posts and profile fields.

Removals tool

Temporary removals

A Search Console tool that temporarily hides a URL from Google results for about six months while a permanent removal method is put in place.

Render queue

Second wave of indexing · Web Rendering Service

The deferred queue in which Google executes a page's JavaScript with a headless Chromium instance after the raw HTML has already been crawled.

Render-blocking resources

Critical rendering path

Stylesheets and synchronous scripts in the head that must be downloaded and processed before the browser can paint anything.

Replatforming

CMS migration

Moving a site to a different content management or commerce platform, a migration type where URL patterns, rendering and metadata control all change at once.

Responsive web design

RWD

Serving the same HTML at one URL and adapting layout with CSS media queries and flexible units, Google's recommended mobile configuration.

Retrieval-augmented generation

RAG

An architecture where a system retrieves relevant documents or passages first and then has a language model generate an answer conditioned on them.

Review and rating markup

Review schema

Structured data describing individual reviews and aggregate ratings for a product or service, enabling star ratings in eligible results.

Review snippet

Star ratings · AggregateRating

Star ratings and review counts shown in results, generated from Review or AggregateRating structured data on eligible page types.

Reviews and review velocity

Review velocity · Google reviews

Customer ratings and written reviews on a business profile, along with the rate at which new ones arrive, contributing to local prominence and conversion.

Reviews system

Product reviews update

Google's system for rewarding in-depth review content that demonstrates first-hand expertise, broadened in 2023 from products to services, businesses and media.

Rich results

Rich snippets · Enhanced results

Search results enhanced with extra visual or interactive elements generated from structured data, such as star ratings, prices, breadcrumbs or event dates.

Rich Results Test

Schema Markup Validator

Google's tool for checking whether a page's structured data qualifies for rich results, run against the rendered page.

Robots meta tag

meta robots

A `<meta name="robots">` element in the HTML head carrying per-page indexing and serving directives such as noindex, nofollow, nosnippet and max-image-preview.

robots.txt

Robots Exclusion Protocol · REP

A plain-text file at the root of a host that tells compliant crawlers which URL paths they may or may not fetch, standardised as RFC 9309.

Scaled content abuse

Mass-produced content

Generating many pages primarily to manipulate rankings rather than help users, whether by AI, templates, scraping, or stitching content together.

Schema.org

Schema vocabulary

A collaborative vocabulary of types and properties for structured data on the web, founded by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex in 2011.

Scraped content

Copied content

Republishing content taken from other sites with no original value added; a spam policy violation and a common source of duplicate-content confusion.

Search generative AI control

A Search Console setting letting site owners include or exclude their site from Google's generative AI features — AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative features in Discover.

Search intent

User intent · Query intent

The underlying goal behind a query — typically classified as informational, navigational, commercial investigation or transactional.

Search Quality Rater Guidelines

QRG · Quality Raters Guidelines

Google's published manual for the external human raters who evaluate search results, defining Page Quality, Needs Met and concepts like E-E-A-T and YMYL.

Search volume

Monthly search volume · MSV

The estimated number of times a query is searched in a period, usually derived from Google Ads data and modelled by third-party tools.

Seasonality

Seasonal demand

Predictable variation in search demand across the year, week or day, which must be controlled for before attributing changes to SEO work.

Security issues and hacked content

Hacked spam

Malware, phishing, deceptive pages or injected spam on a site, reported in Search Console and often accompanied by browser warnings.

Semantic chunking

Content chunking

Splitting documents along meaning boundaries — sections, topics, complete ideas — rather than at fixed character counts, to produce coherent retrievable units.

Semantic HTML

Semantic markup

Using HTML elements according to their meaning — article, nav, main, table, time — rather than generic divs styled to look right.

Semantic search

Retrieval based on the meaning of a query and documents rather than literal keyword matching, using entities, context and learned representations.

SEO audit

Technical audit

A structured assessment of a site's technical, content and authority position, producing prioritised, actionable findings rather than an exhaustive issue list.

SEO forecasting

Traffic forecasting

Projecting future organic performance from current rankings, expected position changes, demand trends and seasonality, usually as a range rather than a point estimate.

SEO governance

SEO process ownership

The processes and ownership that keep SEO requirements enforced over time — review gates, standards, documentation and escalation paths.

SEO KPIs

Search KPIs

The measures used to judge a search programme, ideally a small set combining leading indicators with outcome metrics that connect to revenue.

SEO maturity model

Capability model

A framework describing an organisation's SEO capability across stages, from ad-hoc reactive work to SEO embedded in product, engineering and content processes.

SEO ROI

Return on investment

The financial return generated by SEO investment, calculated from incremental revenue or cost savings against the fully loaded cost of the programme.

SEO split testing

SEO A/B testing

Testing SEO changes by applying them to a random subset of similar pages and comparing outcomes against a held-back control group.

SEO strategy

Search strategy

A documented plan connecting business objectives to a defined search opportunity, the capabilities required, the sequence of work and how success will be judged.

SEO technical debt

Accumulated unresolved technical issues — legacy redirect chains, duplicate URL patterns, orphaned templates, stale markup — that compound and constrain future work.

SERP

Search engine results page

The page a search engine returns for a query, combining organic results with ads, rich results, AI-generated answers and vertical modules.

SERP intent match

Intent alignment

The practice of inferring what Google rewards for a query by analysing the page types, formats and features currently ranking, and matching them.

Server-side rendering

SSR

Generating a page's full HTML on the server for each request, so crawlers and users receive complete markup without executing JavaScript.

Server-side tracking

Server-side tagging

Collecting analytics and marketing data through a server endpoint you control instead of sending it directly from the browser to vendors.

Service area business

SAB

A business that serves customers at their location rather than at its own premises, and which hides its address on its Google Business Profile.

Sessions

Visits

A group of user interactions within a time frame; in GA4 a session begins with a session_start event and ends after 30 minutes of inactivity by default.

Share of search

A brand's share of total branded search volume within its category, used as a leading indicator of market share and brand demand.

Share of voice

SOV · Visibility share

The proportion of available search visibility a site captures across a defined keyword set, weighting positions by expected click-through and query volume.

Share of voice in LLMs

AI share of voice

A brand's share of all brand mentions across a set of AI-generated answers for a category, whether or not those mentions carry a citation link.

Shopping results

Popular products · Shopping graph

Product listings shown on the SERP, sourced from Merchant Center feeds and from structured data on retailer pages, both free and paid.

Single-page application

SPA

An architecture where one HTML shell loads and JavaScript handles all subsequent routing and content updates without full page loads.

Site architecture

Information architecture · Site structure

How a site's URLs, navigation and internal links are organised into a hierarchy that users and crawlers can traverse efficiently.

Site diversity system

Domain crowding · Host crowding

Google's system limiting how many results from the same site appear for a query, typically to two, so results are not dominated by one domain.

Site migration

SEO migration

Any change to a site's domain, URL structure, platform, template or content organisation that materially affects how search engines see it.

Site name

The name Google displays for a website above the result URL, derived from WebSite structured data, og:site_name, the title element and other signals.

Site reputation abuse

Parasite SEO

Publishing third-party content on a host site to exploit that site's ranking signals; a Google spam policy violation regardless of first-party oversight.

Sitelinks

Additional links to sections of a site shown beneath its main result, generated automatically by Google from site structure and user behaviour.

Sitemap index file

Sitemap index

An XML file that lists other sitemap files, letting a site exceed the 50,000-URL per-file limit and organise sitemaps by section.

Soft 404

A URL that returns HTTP 200 while displaying content that means 'not found' or has no real content, causing search engines to treat it as an error.

Spam updates

Spam update

Announced improvements to Google's automated spam detection, distinct from core updates, targeting violations of the spam policies.

SpamBrain

Google's AI-based spam prevention system, used to detect spam at crawl and ranking time and to identify and neutralise unnatural links.

srcset and sizes

Responsive images

HTML attributes that offer the browser multiple image candidates at different widths so it can pick the smallest file that fits the layout and screen density.

Store locator SEO

Branch finder

Making a multi-location store finder crawlable, so every branch page is discoverable through real links rather than only through a JavaScript map interface.

Structured data

Schema markup

Machine-readable annotations on a page, usually Schema.org vocabulary in JSON-LD, that describe entities and make pages eligible for rich results.

Subdirectory vs subdomain vs ccTLD

Subfolder vs subdomain

The three URL structures for international sites — example.com/de/, de.example.com and example.de — each with different authority consolidation and operational costs.

Synthetic traffic

Bot traffic · Non-human traffic

Automated, non-human requests to a site — crawlers, scrapers, monitoring, agents — which increasingly outnumber human visits and distort analytics if not filtered.

TF-IDF

Term frequency-inverse document frequency

A classical information-retrieval weighting that scores a term by how often it appears in a document offset by how common it is across the corpus.

Thin content

Low-value content

Pages with little or no substantive value of their own — scraped, auto-generated, doorway-like, or near-empty templated pages.

Third-party authority metrics

DR · DA · Authority Score · Domain Authority · Domain Rating

Vendor-calculated 0-100 scores estimating a domain's link strength — Ahrefs DR, Moz DA, Semrush Authority Score, Majestic Trust Flow — none of which Google uses.

Third-party scripts

Tag bloat

Externally hosted JavaScript such as analytics, tag managers, consent tools, chat widgets and ad code, which are a leading cause of poor INP and CLS.

Time to First Byte

TTFB

The interval between a navigation request starting and the first byte of the response arriving; a foundational input to LCP and a signal of server and network health.

Title tag

Title element · Title link

The `<title>` element describing a page, used as the primary input to the clickable headline in search results — which Google may rewrite.

Top stories

News carousel

A carousel of recent news articles on the SERP, drawn from sites Google's news systems consider eligible, weighted heavily toward freshness and authority.

Topic authority system

A Google system, described for news surfaces, that surfaces publications with demonstrated expertise in a subject or place more prominently for related queries.

Topic cluster

Content hub

A content model where one broad pillar page links to and from many specific supporting pages covering subtopics of the same subject.

Topical authority

Topical depth

The degree to which a site demonstrates comprehensive, credible coverage of a subject area rather than isolated pages on scattered topics.

Toxic links

Bad links · Spammy backlinks

A vendor term for backlinks judged harmful by a third-party tool's scoring; Google has repeatedly said it has no such classification and simply ignores links it distrusts.

Transcreation

Creative localisation

Recreating content for another market so it works culturally and commercially, rather than translating it word for word.

Trust signals

The observable characteristics that make a site and its content credible: accurate information, transparent ownership, clear contact details, sourcing and disclosure.

Twiddlers

Google's internal term, surfaced in antitrust testimony and leaked documentation, for re-ranking functions applied on top of a core retrieval score.

Unlinked mentions

Brand mentions

References to a brand, product or person in published content that do not include a hyperlink, and which can sometimes be converted into links.

URL Inspection tool

URL Inspection API

A Search Console feature showing Google's indexed state for a URL plus a live test with rendered HTML, screenshot, and page resource loading results.

URL parameters

Query strings

Key-value pairs after a question mark in a URL; they frequently create duplicate content and crawl waste when they do not change page content.

URL structure

Slug · Permalink

The design of a site's URL paths: readable, stable, lowercase, hyphen-separated and free of unnecessary parameters or session identifiers.

User-generated reviews

Customer reviews

Reviews written by customers on a product or service page, which add unique content, support conversion, and feed rating markup.

UTM parameters

Campaign tagging

Query string parameters (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign and others) appended to URLs so analytics can attribute traffic to a campaign.

Vector search

Semantic retrieval · ANN search

Retrieval by nearest-neighbour similarity between embedding vectors rather than by keyword matching, usually implemented with approximate nearest-neighbour indexes.

Video results and carousels

Video pack · Key moments

Video thumbnails shown individually or in a carousel on the SERP, eligible through VideoObject markup, video sitemaps and on-page embedding.

Viewport meta tag

The `<meta name="viewport">` declaration that tells mobile browsers how to size and scale a page to the device screen.

Web accessibility (WCAG)

a11y

Designing and building so people with disabilities can use a site, guided by the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Web font loading

FOIT · FOUT · font-display

The strategy for downloading and applying custom fonts; poor handling causes invisible text (FOIT), layout shift (FOUT) and slow LCP for text-led pages.

WebP

A Google-developed image format supporting lossy and lossless compression plus transparency and animation, typically 25-35% smaller than comparable JPEG or PNG.

X-Robots-Tag

An HTTP response header that carries the same robots directives as the meta robots tag, usable for any file type including PDFs and images.

XML sitemap

Sitemap

An XML file listing URLs a site wants crawled, optionally with lastmod dates, used as a discovery aid by Google, Bing and other engines.

YMYL

Your Money or Your Life

Topics that could significantly affect a person's health, financial stability, safety or wellbeing, held to a higher quality standard by Google's raters.

Zero-click search

No-click search

A search where the user's need is satisfied on the results page itself — by a snippet, knowledge panel, calculator or AI Overview — and no result is clicked.