SEO terms, defined for humans.

AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of Google search results, synthesizing answers from multiple sources before a user clicks any link.

Alt text is a written description added to an image's HTML alt attribute that communicates image content to search engines, screen readers, and browsers when images fail to load.

Anchor text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink — and the words used as anchor text are one of the strongest topical relevance signals search engines use to understand what the linked page is about.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so it gets cited by AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini — not just ranked on traditional search engines.

A backlink is a hyperlink on one website that points to another — one of the strongest ranking signals search engines use to assess the authority, trustworthiness, and topical relevance of the linked page.

A canonical URL is the version of a page that search engines should treat as the primary, indexable copy — declared via a rel='canonical' link tag in the page head.

Click-through rate (CTR) in SEO is the percentage of users who click your result in search results out of the total times it was shown — a measure of how compelling your title, description, and SERP appearance are at a given ranking position.

A content brief is a document specifying everything a writer needs to produce well-targeted SEO content — target keyword, search intent, required sections, competitor analysis, schema requirements, and word count.

A content cluster is a group of interlinked pages covering a topic comprehensively — typically a pillar page plus 10-50 cluster posts targeting specific subtopics — building topical authority through content depth and deliberate internal linking.

Core Web Vitals are Google's three real-user performance metrics — Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — used as a confirmed ranking factor.

Crawl budget is the number of pages Googlebot will crawl on your site in a given timeframe, determined by your site's crawl capacity and Google's perceived demand to crawl it.

Digital PR is a link building and brand-building strategy that earns editorial coverage in online publications by pitching newsworthy stories — original research, expert commentary, and data campaigns — rather than buying links or submitting generic guest posts.

Domain Rating (DR) is Ahrefs' proprietary metric that scores a website's backlink profile strength on a 0-100 logarithmic scale, widely used as a proxy for a site's ability to pass link equity.

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness — Google's framework for evaluating content quality, and the authority signals that heavily influence AI engine citation decisions.

Entity SEO is the practice of optimizing for entities — people, places, organizations, products, concepts — rather than keywords, so search engines and AI systems treat your brand as an authoritative node in their knowledge graphs.

Evergreen content is content that remains relevant and useful over a long period of time — not tied to a specific event, trend, or moment — compounding organic traffic and links without continuous republishing.

A featured snippet is a search result that appears above all organic rankings in a distinct box, displaying a direct answer — paragraph, list, table, or video — extracted from a highly-ranked page.

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is Google's analytics platform for tracking website and app behavior — providing user journey, conversion, and engagement data that complements Search Console's search-specific performance reporting.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the discipline of optimizing content to be cited by generative AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude, and Microsoft Copilot.

Google Search Console is Google's free tool for site owners that provides data on how Google crawls, indexes, and surfaces a site in search — including search performance, index coverage, Core Web Vitals, and manual actions.

HTTP status codes are three-digit codes returned by a server in response to a request, indicating success (2xx), redirection (3xx), client error (4xx), or server error (5xx) — each with different SEO implications.

Indexation is the process by which a search engine adds a page to its searchable index after crawling it — and indexability is the property of being eligible for that process.

Internal linking is the practice of hyperlinking pages within a website to each other, distributing link equity, establishing site architecture, and signaling to search engines which content is most important.

JavaScript SEO is the practice of ensuring that content rendered via JavaScript is correctly crawled, rendered, and indexed by search engines — addressing the gap between what browsers show users and what crawlers can parse.

Keyword research is the process of identifying the terms and phrases your target audience uses to search, so you can create content that matches their intent and competes for the queries that matter most to your business.

A Large Language Model (LLM) is a deep learning AI system trained on massive volumes of text that can generate, summarize, translate, and answer questions with human-like fluency — powering ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity.

Link equity is the SEO value that flows from one page to another through a hyperlink, reflecting the linking page's perceived authority and topical relevance.

LLM Optimization is the practice of structuring content and brand signals so Large Language Models — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and the engines they power — preferentially cite and reference your content when generating answers.

A long-tail keyword is a specific, multi-word search query (typically three or more words) that carries lower individual search volume than head terms but higher purchase intent and lower competition.

A meta description is an HTML attribute that provides a brief summary of a webpage — displayed below the title tag in search results and used by Google to generate snippets, though it's not a direct ranking factor.

A nofollow link carries a rel='nofollow' attribute that signals to search engines not to pass link equity through it — used on paid placements, user-generated content, and links the publisher doesn't editorially endorse.

Organic traffic is website visits that arrive from unpaid search results — users who found your content by searching on Google, Bing, or another search engine and clicked a non-paid result.

A pillar page is a comprehensive piece of long-form content that broadly covers a core topic, serving as the authority hub that links to and is linked from by cluster content targeting specific subtopics.

A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a network of websites built or acquired primarily to create backlinks pointing at a target site — a black-hat scheme that violates Google's guidelines and risks severe, often irreversible ranking penalties.

A robots.txt file is a plain-text file at a domain's root that tells search engine crawlers which pages or directories they are and aren't allowed to crawl.

Schema markup is structured data added to a webpage using the Schema.org vocabulary, telling search engines and AI systems explicitly what each part of the content represents.

Search intent is the underlying goal a user has when entering a query — informational, navigational, commercial, or transactional — and matching content to that intent is the foundation of on-page SEO.

Semantic search is search engine behavior that understands the meaning, context, and relationships behind a query — rather than just matching keywords — enabling engines to answer what a user actually wants rather than what they literally typed.

A SERP (Search Engine Results Page) is the page a search engine displays in response to a query — containing organic results, paid results, and increasingly, AI-generated answer panels, featured snippets, local packs, and other rich features.

Structured data is information formatted in a standardized way — typically using the Schema.org vocabulary in JSON-LD format — so search engines and AI systems can understand and use it explicitly.

Technical SEO is the practice of optimizing a website's infrastructure — crawlability, indexation, site speed, structured data, and URL architecture — so search engines can efficiently discover, parse, and rank it.

A title tag is the HTML element that specifies a webpage's title — displayed as the clickable headline in search results and used as a primary on-page relevance signal by search engines.

Topical authority is the perceived expertise a website has on a specific subject, built by publishing comprehensive, interlinked content that covers the topic deeply rather than thinly.

A URL slug is the human-readable portion of a URL that identifies a specific page — typically a short, hyphenated description of the page's content appearing after the domain and directory structure.

An XML sitemap is a file that lists a website's important URLs in a structured format, giving search engines a reliable list of pages to discover and crawl — particularly useful for large sites or pages that lack strong internal links.