SEO & AI Glossary

The practice of optimising content to appear in AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews.

The process of improving an app's visibility in the Apple App Store and Google Play to increase downloads and conversion rate.

The simulation of human intelligence in machines programmed to think, learn, and solve problems autonomously.

A technique in neural networks that allows the model to focus on the most relevant parts of an input when generating output.

A framework that assigns credit for conversions to the different marketing touchpoints in a customer's journey.

The time period after an ad interaction within which a conversion is credited to that ad — typically ranging from 1 day to 90 days depending on the channel and purchase cycle.

A trending visual style that uses soft, multi-color radial or mesh gradients reminiscent of northern lights — popularized by Stripe and Linear circa 2020.

The long-term strategy of building a website's credibility and link equity through consistent content creation, digital PR, and topical depth — the foundation of sustained organic search performance.

Semrush's composite metric for estimating the overall quality and SEO power of a domain or webpage, combining backlink profile, organic traffic, and spam factors.

The mean ranking position of a page in search results for a given keyword, as reported in Google Search Console.

A content strategy focused on educating and nurturing business buyers across longer, multi-stakeholder sales cycles.

Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers — Google's breakthrough NLP model that transformed how search understands language.

An inbound link from one website to another, serving as a vote of confidence that influences search engine rankings.

The process of reviewing a website's inbound link profile to identify toxic or low-quality links that may be suppressing organic rankings.

A layout pattern where content is arranged in a grid of variably-sized cells, like the compartments of a Japanese bento box — popularized by Apple keynote slides circa 2022.

Google Cloud's serverless data warehouse that enables SQL queries on large datasets, widely used for unsampled GA4 data analysis.

Microsoft's free local business listing platform that controls how businesses appear in Bing Maps and Bing search local results.

Optimising a website to rank well in Microsoft Bing's search engine — a smaller but significant market with its own ranking factors and Webmaster Tools suite.

Microsoft's free platform for monitoring a site's Bing search performance, submitting sitemaps, and diagnosing indexing issues on Bing and Yahoo.

SEO practices that violate search engine guidelines — including cloaking, keyword stuffing, PBNs, and paid link schemes — designed to manipulate rankings artificially.