Glossary
Key terms and definitions
A
- AI Overviews
- Google's AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of search results, synthesizing answers from multiple sources.
- AI Visibility
- The frequency and prominence with which a brand appears in AI-generated answers across platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
- Anonymized Queries
- Search terms in Google Search Console that are hidden from keyword reports because they were issued by fewer than a few dozen users over a two-to-three month period.
- Answer Engine Optimization
- The practice of structuring content so AI-powered search systems extract and cite it when generating responses to user queries.
B
- Brand Visibility Percentage
- The share of AI-generated answers that mention a specific brand for a defined set of relevant queries.
C
- Click-Through Rate
- The percentage of users who click on a search result after seeing it on the SERP.
- Content Cluster
- A hub-and-spoke content architecture where a comprehensive pillar page links to and from supporting articles covering subtopics within the same theme.
- Content Warehouse API
- Google's internal API, leaked in 2024, that exposed documented ranking attributes including site-level topical authority variables.
- Core Web Vitals
- Google's set of three page experience metrics — LCP, CLS, and INP — used as a ranking signal in Search.
- Crawl Budget
- The set of URLs Google can and wants to crawl on a site, determined by the server's capacity to handle requests and Google's assessment of a site's crawl-worthy content.
D
- Dark AI Traffic
- AI-referred website visits that analytics tools can't properly attribute because the referring AI platform strips or omits referrer headers.
- Doorway Pages
- Multiple pages or sites created to rank for similar search queries that funnel users to intermediate destinations rather than answering their questions directly.
E
- E-E-A-T
- Google's quality framework evaluating Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness of content and its creators.
F
- Faceted Navigation
- A site navigation pattern that lets users filter content by multiple attributes (color, size, price), often generating massive numbers of crawlable URL variations.
- Featured Snippet
- A highlighted answer box at the top of Google search results that extracts content directly from a webpage.
G
- Google Search Console
- Google's free tool that provides search performance data including impressions, clicks, CTR, and average position for pages indexed in Google Search.
- Googlebot
- Google's web crawler that discovers and fetches pages for indexing, using a headless Chromium instance to render JavaScript content in a separate processing queue.
I
- Impression
- A count registered each time a URL or property appears in search results, with the counting method varying by GSC's aggregation mode.
- Interaction to Next Paint
- A Core Web Vital that measures the latency from a user interaction (click, tap, or keypress) to the next visual update, reported at the 98th percentile per session.
K
- Knowledge Panel
- An information box on Google's SERP that displays structured facts about entities like people, places, and organizations.
L
- Long Animation Frames API
- A Chrome browser API that identifies which specific scripts cause slow interactions by providing frame-level attribution data.
M
- Matthew Effect
- A cumulative advantage phenomenon where already highly-cited sources receive disproportionately more citations from LLMs.
N
- Navboost
- Google's internal click quality system that classifies user interactions into good clicks and bad clicks, creating a feedback loop that strengthens or suppresses rankings over time.
P
- Position Bias
- The tendency of LLMs to favor sources based on their ordinal position in the retrieval context window rather than quality alone.
- Programmatic SEO
- A search optimization strategy that uses structured data and templates to generate large numbers of pages targeting long-tail keyword variations at scale.
R
- Render Budget
- The finite capacity Google allocates to executing JavaScript and rendering pages for a given site, separate from and more constrained than its crawl budget.
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation
- An AI architecture that retrieves relevant documents from external sources and uses them as context when generating responses.
- Rich Results
- Enhanced Google search listings generated from schema markup, displaying additional visual elements like star ratings, prices, or event dates beyond standard blue links.
S
- Scaled Content Abuse
- A Google spam policy violation where pages are generated at scale primarily to manipulate search rankings rather than help users.
- Schema Markup
- Structured data vocabulary (typically JSON-LD) added to web pages to help search engines and AI systems understand content meaning and relationships.
- SERP
- Search engine results page — the page displayed by a search engine in response to a query.
- Server-Side Rendering
- A web rendering strategy where the server generates fully formed HTML for each page request, making content immediately visible to search crawlers and AI systems without requiring JavaScript execution.
- Share of Voice
- A brand's mention frequency relative to competitors across a defined set of AI prompts or search queries.
T
- Topical Authority
- A site-level ranking signal based on how deeply and coherently a website covers a specific subject area, as measured by Google's internal siteFocusScore and siteRadius variables.
Y
- YMYL
- Your Money or Your Life — Google's classification for content topics that could impact a person's health, financial stability, safety, or well-being.
Z
- Zero-Click Search
- A search query that ends without the user clicking any result, typically because the answer is displayed directly on the SERP.