SEO & AI Glossary

An advertising metric measuring the average cost to acquire one lead—a prospect who has expressed interest by completing a form or action.

An advertising pricing model where advertisers pay a set rate for every 1,000 impressions their ad receives.

An advertising pricing metric measuring the average cost an advertiser pays each time a user views a video ad.

Customer Relationship Management — software that manages a company's interactions with current and potential customers across the full sales lifecycle.

A prompt that encourages a user to take a specific desired action—clicking a button, filling a form, making a purchase, or scheduling a call.

The preferred version of a page URL, specified via a rel=canonical tag to consolidate ranking signals when duplicate or similar content exists.

A detailed account of how a customer achieved a specific result using a product or service, used as persuasive bottom-of-funnel content.

Optimising e-commerce or content category pages to rank for broad, high-intent keywords that capture users at the consideration stage.

A prompting and reasoning pattern that asks a language model to work through a problem step by step before giving the final answer.

A prompting technique that instructs AI models to show their reasoning step by step before reaching a conclusion.

Google's public dataset of real-world performance metrics collected from opted-in Chrome users, used to power Core Web Vitals assessments in Search Console and PageSpeed Insights.

The percentage of customers or revenue lost within a given period, a critical indicator of product-market fit and retention health in subscription businesses.

The process of creating and managing business listings across online directories and platforms to improve local SEO authority.

Monitoring where and how often a brand or piece of content is cited across the web, AI systems, and social channels — a key metric for AI search visibility and brand authority.

A measure of how structurally and semantically suitable a piece of content is to be quoted or cited by an AI engine as a source.

Anthropic's family of large language models known for safety focus, long context windows, and use in enterprise AI applications.

A 3D-influenced design style featuring soft, rounded, clay-like shapes with playful color palettes and subtle drop shadows — popular on illustration-heavy marketing sites.

The number of clicks required to reach a page from the website homepage, a key indicator of how easily crawlers and users can access content.

The percentage of users who click on a search result, ad, or link after seeing it — calculated as clicks divided by impressions.

The practice of improving the percentage of users who click on a search listing, ad, or email by optimising titles, meta descriptions, and visual elements.

The regular communication of campaign performance data and insights to clients, typically in a dashboard or PDF report format on a monthly or quarterly cadence.

A rendering approach where the browser downloads a minimal HTML shell and uses JavaScript to build the full page after load.

A black-hat SEO technique that shows different content or URLs to search engine crawlers than to human users — a violation of Google's guidelines.

A method of grouping users by a shared characteristic or acquisition date to compare retention, behaviour, and lifetime value over time.

A search intent type where the user is researching options before making a purchase decision—comparing, evaluating, and investigating.

The practice of building, growing, and moderating an online community around a brand, product, or shared interest.

Dedicated landing pages that compare a brand's product or service against a competitor's, targeting high-intent 'vs' and 'alternative' queries.

The systematic evaluation of competing brands' SEO strategies, content approaches, backlink profiles, and SERP positioning to identify opportunities and threats.

A field of AI that enables computers to interpret and understand visual information from images and video.

Television content streamed over the internet via smart TVs, streaming sticks, or gaming consoles, accessed through OTT platforms and addressable to programmatic advertising.

Google's framework that adjusts how Google tags behave based on a user's cookie consent choices, using modelled data to fill gaps where consent is withheld.

A systematic review of all existing website content to evaluate performance, identify gaps, and determine which pages should be updated, consolidated, or removed.

A scheduling tool that plans content creation and publication across topics, formats, and channels over a defined time period.

A geographically distributed network of servers that caches and delivers web content from locations close to each user.

The process of sharing and promoting content across multiple channels to maximise its reach, engagement, and ROI.

The process of identifying topics your competitors cover that you don't, revealing opportunities to create content that captures missing traffic.

A centralised section of a website that organises all content on a broad topic into a structured, interlinked resource centre — also called a resource hub or learning centre.

Adapting website content to resonate with a specific locale — adjusting language, cultural references, currency, and regional keyword variants beyond simple translation.

A strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience.

A framework mapping content types to each stage of the buyer journey — top-of-funnel awareness content, mid-funnel consideration content, and bottom-of-funnel decision content.

The SEO practice of removing or consolidating low-quality, low-traffic pages to improve a site's overall quality signals and crawl efficiency.

Updating existing content with new information, improved structure, and current data to maintain or improve its search rankings.

Adapting an existing piece of content into different formats to reach new audiences and maximise the return on content investment.

The planning, development, and management of content to achieve specific business goals across all channels and formats.

The practice of republishing content on third-party platforms or publications to reach new audiences beyond the original channel.

The rate at which a website publishes new content, often cited as a signal of site freshness and a factor in how frequently Googlebot crawls a domain.

The maximum amount of text—measured in tokens—that a language model can process in a single interaction.

An interface pattern built around text or voice dialogue between the user and the system — chatbots, voice assistants, AI agents, customer support widgets.

The stages a potential customer moves through from first contact with a brand to completing a desired action—purchase, sign-up, or enquiry.

The percentage of visitors or sessions that complete a desired goal action — purchases, sign-ups, form submissions, or downloads.

The systematic process of improving a website or landing page to increase the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action.

The implementation of measurement pixels, tags, or events that record when users complete desired actions — purchases, form fills, calls — after interacting with marketing.

The mechanism by which websites obtain users' permission to use cookies and tracking technologies, as required by GDPR, CCPA, and similar regulations.

The phase-out of third-party browser cookies used for cross-site tracking, driven by privacy regulations and browser policy changes across Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.

Analytics approaches that measure website performance without relying on third-party cookies, using modelling, aggregation, or server-side methods.

Measurement approaches that track user behaviour and conversions without relying on third-party cookies — including first-party data, server-side tracking, and probabilistic modelling.

Google's set of user experience metrics—LCP, INP, and CLS—that measure loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.

Software and browser utilities used to measure, diagnose, and improve Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift scores.

The most important, comprehensive content on a website that best represents what the business does and targets primary keywords.

The total marketing spend divided by the number of new customers or conversions achieved — a key efficiency metric for paid and performance marketing campaigns.

The number of pages Googlebot will crawl on a website within a given timeframe, determined by crawl rate and crawl demand.

The maximum number of links Googlebot follows from the homepage to reach a given page during a single crawl session.

Problems encountered by search engine bots when trying to access pages on a website, including 404 not found errors, 500 server errors, and redirect issues.

The relative importance Google assigns to crawling different pages on a site — influenced by internal linking, PageRank, XML sitemaps, and update frequency.

The ability of search engine bots to access, read, and navigate a website's pages and content.

The ecosystem of independent content creators who build audiences and monetise through platforms, brand deals, subscriptions, and digital products.

Linking between two different websites that are owned or controlled by the same entity — a practice Google may treat as a link scheme if done primarily to manipulate PageRank.

A Core Web Vital measuring the visual stability of a page — how much page elements move unexpectedly during loading.

Ad targeting segments built from a brand's own data—website visitors, email lists, CRM records, or app users—uploaded to an ad platform.

The total cost of acquiring a new customer, calculated by dividing total marketing and sales spend by the number of new customers acquired.

A platform that unifies customer data from multiple sources into a single persistent profile, accessible to other marketing tools.

The complete sequence of interactions and experiences a customer has with a brand from initial awareness through purchase and beyond.

The total revenue a business can expect to generate from a single customer relationship over the entire duration of that relationship.

The business function responsible for ensuring customers achieve their desired outcomes with a product, driving retention and expansion revenue.

A design aesthetic drawing from 1980s sci-fi futurism — neon accents on dark backgrounds, glitch effects, monospace typography, and dystopian futurism.