SEO and GEO glossary: 24 terms, one-sentence definitions

SEO is the combined technical, content and authority work done to improve a website's organic rankings and click-through rate in search engines.

Unlike advertising, you do not pay per click — but the effect accumulates slowly and, once built, has to be maintained.

Organic traffic is the visitors who arrive by clicking the unpaid listings in search results.

It does not stop when a budget stops. It also erodes just as fast when rankings are lost, which is why organic traffic is a position to defend rather than an asset you own.

The SERP is the full results page a search engine returns for a query.

It is no longer ten blue links: AI Overviews, featured snippets, map packs, video and shopping blocks push classic results down the screen. Ranking first is not the same as being on the first screen.

PageRank is the algorithm developed by Google's founders that scores a page's importance by the number and quality of links pointing at it.

Google no longer publishes a PageRank score, but distributing authority across the link graph is still at the core of ranking. In practice: one link from a strong page beats a hundred ordinary ones.

A backlink is a link another website gives to a page on yours.

What gives it value is not the count but the relevance and trustworthiness of the source. Bulk links from purchased networks now generate risk, not benefit.

Anchor text is the clickable text of a link, and it is a strong signal about what the destination page covers.

"Click here" says nothing; "technical SEO audit" tells both the reader and the crawler what the target page is about.

E-E-A-T is a content quality framework built on four criteria: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.

It is not a direct ranking score — it is the standard Google gives its quality raters. Its practical translation is concrete: who wrote this, what experience it rests on, and what the claims are sourced from should all be visible on the page.

Search intent is what the person typing a query actually wants to do: learn, compare, navigate somewhere, or buy.

The most common reason for losing a ranking is not thin content but content written for the wrong intent. Someone searching "free seo analysis" expects a tool they can run, not a service page.

GEO is the discipline of optimising so that a brand is cited as a source inside the answers generated by AI answer engines.

Classic SEO competes for a place among ten blue links; GEO competes for a place inside the answer itself. The method differs: crisp definitions, sourced data, machine-readable structured data and consistent entity information.

AEO structures content to answer a question directly, aiming for featured snippets and voice assistant answers.

It is often confused with GEO. The practical difference: AEO tries to get an existing page selected as the answer, GEO tries to get cited inside newly generated text.

AI Overviews is the AI-generated summary block Google places at the top of results, linking out to a handful of sources.

Where it appears, it measurably reduces the click-through rate of the classic first result. Being in that source list is now worth as much as ranking first.

llms.txt is a plain-text, machine-readable summary of a site written for AI models.

robots.txt governs access; llms.txt summarises meaning. It states what the brand does, which pages matter and the core company facts, in one file.

Share of citations is the proportion of AI answers across a target query set in which the brand is named as a source.

It is the real scorecard for GEO work. Classic rank tracking cannot measure it; queries are put to the models at intervals and the sources in each answer are counted.

A technical SEO audit is the systematic review of a site's crawlability, indexability, speed, structured data and architecture.

It comes before content and link work: a page that cannot be crawled cannot rank, however well it is written.

Crawl budget is the number of pages a search engine is willing to crawl on your site in a given period.

It is rarely a problem on small sites. On large e-commerce catalogues, millions of junk URLs born from filter combinations consume the budget and real product pages get indexed late.

A canonical tag is the HTML signal that declares which address is the primary version when the same or very similar content lives at several URLs.

Set wrong it is an insidious fault: the page renders, throws no error, and quietly hands its ranking strength to another address.

Hreflang is the tag that declares which language and region a page is for and where its equivalents in other languages live.

Missing or non-reciprocal hreflang serves the English page to a Turkish user. In the data it shows up as an unexplained drop in conversion.

Structured data is the markup layer that tells search engines, in machine-readable form, what the information on a page means.

It is the precondition for rich results and it makes it far easier for AI engines to connect entities. Today it is the cheapest, highest-return step in GEO work.

Core Web Vitals is Google's user experience measurement set, made up of LCP (largest contentful paint), INP (interaction to next paint) and CLS (cumulative layout shift).

The thresholds are 2.5 seconds, 200 milliseconds and 0.1 respectively. Passing them will not lift rankings on its own, but failing them lowers conversion directly.

Indexing is the step where a crawled page is stored in the search engine's database and becomes eligible to appear in results.

Being crawled and being indexed are not the same thing. "Crawled — currently not indexed" in Search Console usually means the content was not judged distinct or useful enough.

SEO metrics are the numbers that measure search visibility and its conversion into business results: impressions, clicks, CTR, average position, indexed pages and organic conversions.

Tracking all of them at once creates noise. The question that clears it: which number, if it moved, would change a decision we make?

An impression is one instance of your site being displayed to a user in the results for a query.

It is the first metric to rise on a new page. Impressions growing before clicks arrive is not bad news — it means Google has started testing the page.

CTR is the share of impressions that turn into clicks: clicks divided by impressions.

Read it against position. A 2% CTR at position three is a title problem; a 2% CTR at position thirty is above expectation.

Average position is the mean of the ranks at which your site was shown for a query.

Being an average makes it deceptive: moving from 80 to 60 brings no clicks but confirms the direction. The threshold that matters is the first page — the top ten.