SEO & AI Glossary

The percentage of searchers who see your page in organic results and click on it — a metric visible in Google Search Console that reflects title and description effectiveness.

Unpaid search engine traffic earned through SEO, appearing in natural SERP listings rather than paid advertising positions.

Visitors who arrive at a website by clicking unpaid search engine results — the primary output metric of SEO programmes.

Web pages that have no internal links pointing to them, making them invisible to search engine crawlers navigating the site's link structure.

When a machine learning model learns training data too precisely, performing well on training data but poorly on new, unseen data.

The use of scripts, machine learning bid strategies, and rules-based systems to automate repetitive or time-sensitive tasks in paid search and display campaign management.

A Google ranking signal set that evaluates how users perceive interactions with a web page, encompassing Core Web Vitals, HTTPS, and mobile usability.

How quickly a web page loads and becomes usable for visitors, a direct ranking factor and key user experience signal.

Google's original link-based algorithm, which scores pages by the number and quality of other pages linking to them — still a core component of Google's ranking system.

The division of content across multiple pages (page 1, 2, 3...) on blogs, category pages, or search results, with specific SEO handling requirements.

A 2011 Google algorithm update that targeted low-quality, thin, and duplicate content — penalising sites with high proportions of poor-quality pages.

Publishing content on high-authority third-party platforms — Reddit, Medium, Forbes contributor networks — to rank for competitive keywords by borrowing the host site's domain authority.

Google's ability to index and rank specific passages within a long-form page, enabling it to surface relevant sections for specific queries.

A Google algorithm capability that can rank individual passages from long pages for specific queries, even if the overall page isn't the best match.

An online advertising model where advertisers pay a fee each time their ad is clicked, primarily used for search and social ads.

A 2012 Google algorithm update that targeted manipulative link building — including keyword-stuffed anchor text, link farms, and paid link schemes.

A Google SERP feature showing related questions and expandable answers for a given query, drawn from indexed web content.

A goal-based Google Ads campaign type that serves ads across all Google channels from a single campaign using AI-driven asset selection.

An AI-powered answer engine that provides sourced, conversational responses to queries by searching the web in real time and synthesising results.

Tailoring content, messaging, and experiences to individual users based on their behaviour, preferences, and characteristics.