SEO & AI Search Glossary.

A 301 redirect is an HTTP status code indicating that a URL has permanently moved to a new location. Browsers, crawlers, and intermediate ca…

A 302 redirect is an HTTP status code indicating that a URL has TEMPORARILY moved to a new location, with the implication that the original …

410 Gone is an HTTP status code indicating that a resource was previously available but has been intentionally removed and will not return. …

The `@id` property in JSON-LD provides a stable URL identifier for an entity, allowing other schema blocks to reference the same entity by t…

The `aggregateRating` property in schema.org represents the overall rating of an entity (Product, Service, LocalBusiness, etc.) calculated f…

AI-referred traffic is web traffic arriving from AI assistants and answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overv…

Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a hyperlink — the part users see and click. Google uses anchor text as a contextual signal abo…

Average position is a Search Console metric showing the average rank of a URL across all impressions for a query. The math: sum of (impressi…

A backlink is a hyperlink from one website to another. Google originally built PageRank around them (one site linking to another as a vote o…

BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) is a neural network architecture Google introduced into its ranking algorithm…

A canonical tag is an HTML directive (<link rel='canonical' href='...'>) that tells search engines which version of a URL is the authoritati…

A ccTLD is a country-code top-level domain — a domain suffix tied to a specific country (.de for Germany, .fr for France, .jp for Japan, .uk…

Citation rate is the percentage of relevant AI-engine queries in which a brand is cited by name. Measured per engine (ChatGPT, Claude, Perpl…

Citation tracking is the operational discipline of monitoring how often and where your brand is mentioned in AI-generated answers across Cha…

CTR is the percentage of impressions that result in a click, calculated as (clicks ÷ impressions) × 100. In SEO context, it typically refers…

A Google Core Update is a broad algorithmic refresh that Google rolls out 3-5 times per year, adjusting how the ranking algorithm weighs man…

Core Web Vitals are Google's three measurable page-experience signals: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measuring loading speed, Interaction t…

Crawl budget is the volume of pages Google (and other crawlers) will fetch from your site within a given timeframe. It's a function of two f…

CLS is a Core Web Vitals metric that quantifies how much visible content unexpectedly moves on the page during loading and user session. The…

The Disavow tool is a Google Search Console feature that lets site owners ask Google to ignore specific inbound links (or entire domains) wh…

Domain Authority (Moz) and Domain Rating (Ahrefs) are third-party logarithmic 0-100 scores that estimate a domain's likelihood of ranking ba…

E-E-A-T is Google's framework for evaluating content quality — Experience (first-hand), Expertise (subject knowledge), Authoritativeness (re…

Entity authority is the degree to which search engines and AI systems trust your brand as a recognizable, well-defined entity in their knowl…

A Featured Snippet is Google's selected answer-box result that appears above the standard organic results — a single ~40-80 word excerpt ext…

FCP is the time from page request to the first piece of content (text, image, SVG, non-white canvas) being painted on the screen. FCP is a s…

Geo-targeting in Google Search Console is a setting that explicitly tells Google which country you want a property to target. Available for …

Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business / GMB) is the free Google product through which businesses claim and manage their prese…

A hallucination is when an AI model (LLM) generates output that is fluent and confident but factually wrong — invented citations, fabricated…

HARO (Help A Reporter Out) was a service connecting journalists with expert sources. It rebranded to Connectively in 2024 and was acquired b…

Heading hierarchy is the structural use of H1-H6 HTML elements to organize page content. Best practice: one H1 per page (the primary topic),…

The Helpful Content Update was Google's algorithm change (originally launched August 2022, integrated into core algorithm by March 2024) tha…

Image alt text is the <img alt='...'> attribute that describes what an image shows. It serves three roles: accessibility (screen readers rea…

An impression in SEO is one instance of a URL appearing in a search result page — whether the user scrolled to see it or not. Tracked in Goo…

Indexation is the process by which search engines add discovered URLs to their searchable index. A page that's crawled isn't automatically i…

INP is a Core Web Vitals metric that measures the responsiveness of a page across its entire session. INP captures the longest delay between…

Internal linking is the practice of connecting pages on the same domain via hyperlinks, ideally with descriptive keyword-rich anchor text. I…

IP geolocation is the technique of inferring a visitor's geographic location from their IP address — typically country, region, and sometime…

ISO 639-1 is the international standard that defines two-letter codes for languages (en for English, fr for French, ja for Japanese, etc.). …

JavaScript SEO is the discipline of ensuring that JavaScript-rendered content (React, Vue, Angular, Next.js, Svelte) is discoverable, crawla…

JSON-LD (JSON for Linked Data) is the recommended format for shipping schema.org structured data on a website. It uses standard JSON syntax …

Google's Knowledge Graph is a structured database of entities (people, places, organizations, things, concepts) and the relationships betwee…

A Knowledge Panel is the structured brand card Google displays on the right side of search results (or top on mobile) for branded queries. I…

A Large Language Model (LLM) is a neural network trained on hundreds of billions of words of text data that predicts the next token in a seq…

LCP is the time, measured in seconds, for the largest visible element on a page to render. Part of Google's Core Web Vitals, LCP measures pe…

Link equity (informally 'link juice') is the implicit ranking value transferred from one page to another through hyperlinks. Originally form…

A manual action is a penalty applied by a Google reviewer (human, not algorithm) when a site violates Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Visible…

The meta description is the HTML <meta name='description'> attribute used as the snippet beneath the title in search results. Not a direct r…

MUM (Multitask Unified Model) is a Google AI model announced in May 2021 that is 1000× more powerful than BERT, capable of understanding and…

NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone — the three pieces of business information that must be consistent across your website, Google Business …

Panda is a Google algorithm update originally launched in February 2011 to demote low-quality, thin-content sites in search results. It targ…

Penguin is a Google algorithm update launched in April 2012 to demote sites with manipulative inbound link patterns — paid links, link schem…

Prompt engineering is the practice of crafting input text for an LLM to produce desired output — including instruction phrasing, examples, s…

A Quick Answer Block (QAB) is a 40-80 word definitional paragraph placed at the top of a page, immediately after the H1, formatted as a dire…

A redirect chain is a sequence of HTTP redirects (URL A → URL B → URL C → URL D) where each redirect adds latency, consumes crawl budget, an…

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is the technique of combining a Large Language Model with a real-time retrieval layer that fetches curr…

The `sameAs` property in schema.org links an entity declared on your site to its representations elsewhere — Wikidata, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, …

Search intent is the underlying goal a user has when they enter a query — what they're actually trying to accomplish, not just the words the…

Semantic search is search that uses meaning and intent — not just keyword matching — to retrieve results. Where lexical search asks 'does th…

Share of voice (SoV) in SEO is the percentage of organic visibility your brand captures across a defined query set, relative to your competi…

A soft 404 is a page that returns HTTP status 200 OK to crawlers but actually displays 'page not found' or similar empty/error content to us…

SpamBrain is Google's neural-network-based spam detection system, introduced in 2018 and continuously evolved since. It identifies and demot…

Speed Index is a Lighthouse lab metric that measures how quickly the visible content of a page is visually populated. It captures the averag…

TTFB measures the time from the browser sending a request to receiving the first byte of the response from the server. It's a server-side pe…

The title tag is the HTML element (<title>) that defines a page's title — shown in browser tabs, used as the clickable headline in search re…

TBT measures the total time the main thread was blocked by long-running JavaScript tasks (>50ms each) between First Contentful Paint and Tim…

The URL Inspection tool is a Google Search Console feature that returns Google's current state for any URL on your verified domain — whether…

A vector embedding is a numerical representation of a piece of text (a word, sentence, or document) as a multi-dimensional vector — typicall…

A visibility index is a composite metric that aggregates a site's rankings across thousands of tracked keywords into a single normalized sco…

Wikidata is the Wikimedia Foundation's structured-data sister project to Wikipedia. Every entity in Wikidata gets a unique Q-number identifi…

x-default is a special hreflang value that designates the fallback URL for users whose language/locale doesn't match any specific hreflang e…

X-Robots-Tag is an HTTP response header that lets server administrators apply robots-meta directives (noindex, nofollow, noarchive, etc.) at…

An XML sitemap is a structured file listing the canonical URLs you want search engines to index, optionally with metadata (lastmod, changefr…

YMYL is Google's classification for content that could materially impact a user's financial stability, physical health, safety, or wellbeing…