Glossary
Short, plain definitions of the terms that come up when you work on search, links and visibility in AI answers.
A permanent redirect that sends people and search engines from an old URL to a new one. It tells Google the move is final, so the new page can inherit most of the old page's standing. Use it whenever a page moves or is merged, and avoid chains of redirects pointing to redirects.
The practice of shaping content so it can be lifted straight into a direct answer, whether in a featured snippet, a voice assistant or an AI tool. It favours clear questions, short factual answers and well-structured pages. Think of it as writing the answer someone wants, in a form a machine can quote.
The AI-written summaries Google shows above its regular results for many searches. They draw on a handful of web pages and usually link to them as sources. Being one of those linked sources is a new kind of visibility, separate from ranking first in the blue links.
The clickable words in a link. Search engines read it as a clue to what the linked page is about. Natural anchor text varies, and a profile stuffed with the same exact-match keyword looks manipulated.
A link from another website to yours. Links from relevant, well-read sites remain one of the strongest signals that a page deserves to rank. Quality matters far more than count.
A line of code that tells search engines which version of a page is the main one when several URLs show the same or very similar content. It stops duplicates from competing with each other. Ecommerce sites with filters and tracking parameters rely on it heavily.
In AI search, a citation is a source an AI answer links to or names. In local SEO, the word also means a listing of your business name, address and phone number on another site. Both tell systems that your business is real and worth referencing.
The share of people who click your result after seeing it. A low rate on a well-ranked page often points to a weak title or description, or a result that does not match what the searcher wanted. Search Console reports it for every query and page.
Google's measures of how a page feels to use: how quickly the main content loads, how fast it responds to input, and how much the layout jumps around while loading. They are part of how Google judges page experience. Real-user data for them is in Search Console.
The amount of crawling a search engine is willing to do on your site in a given period. Small sites rarely need to think about it. Large sites with many URLs, filters or duplicates can waste it on pages that should never be indexed.
A normal link with no attribute telling search engines to ignore it. It can pass ranking value to the page it points to. The term is informal: there is no dofollow tag, only the absence of nofollow, sponsored or ugc.
Ahrefs' score for the strength of a site's backlink profile, on a scale of 0 to 100. It says nothing directly about traffic or readers. A high Domain Rating with little organic traffic is a common warning sign when buying links.
Short for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. It comes from Google's guidelines for the people who rate search quality, and describes what makes content credible. Real authors, first-hand knowledge and clear sourcing all support it.
A distinct thing that search engines and AI models recognise, such as a person, a brand, a place or a product. Search has moved from matching words to understanding entities and how they relate. A brand that is described consistently across the web becomes a clearer entity.
Work aimed at getting a brand mentioned and cited in answers from AI tools such as Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. It overlaps heavily with good SEO, but adds a focus on being named by trusted third-party sources. The goal is to be part of the answer, not just a link below it.
The free listing that shows a business in Google Maps and local results. It holds your address, hours, categories, photos and reviews. A complete, accurate profile is the starting point for local search.
An article written by an outside author and published on someone else's site, usually with a link back to the author's business. On a well-read, relevant site it can bring both readers and ranking value. On sites that publish anything for a fee, it brings little of either.
The step where a search engine stores a page so it can appear in results. A page can be crawled and still not indexed. Search Console's page indexing report shows which pages are in and why others were left out.
Links between pages on your own site. They help search engines find pages and understand which ones matter most. Linking from strong pages to important ones is one of the cheapest SEO improvements available.
A tool's estimate of how hard it would be to reach the first page for a keyword, usually based on the links pointing to pages that already rank. Each tool calculates it differently. Treat it as a rough guide, not a verdict.
Adding a link into an article that is already published, rather than publishing a new one. The page may already have readers and rankings. It only helps when the link fits the article naturally and the page is genuinely read.
The block of local businesses shown with a map at the top of many local searches. Results come from Google Business Profiles. Relevance, distance and prominence, including reviews, all influence who appears.
A link carrying the rel="nofollow" attribute, which asks search engines not to pass ranking credit through it. Google treats it as a hint rather than a strict rule. It is common on comments, forums and many large publishers.
Visits that arrive from unpaid search results. Tools like Ahrefs estimate it for any site, while your own analytics and Search Console measure it for yours. For judging a site you might get a link from, estimated organic traffic says more than any authority score.
Code added to a page, usually in JSON-LD format, that describes its content in a standard vocabulary from schema.org. It tells search engines plainly that a page is a product, a recipe, an article or a business. It can make pages eligible for richer results and helps machines understand the facts on the page.
Google's free tool for site owners. It shows the queries people used to find you, your clicks, impressions and average positions, plus indexing problems and Core Web Vitals. It is the most reliable source of search data about your own site.
What a searcher actually wants from a query: to learn something, find a particular site, compare options or buy. Pages that match the intent rank more easily than pages that only match the words. Looking at what already ranks is the fastest way to read intent.
Any major change to a site's platform, domain, structure or URLs. Done badly, it can wipe out years of search traffic. Done well, it maps every old URL to a new one, carries content and metadata across, and is checked closely after launch.
A link marked rel="sponsored" to show it was paid for. Google asks that paid links carry this or nofollow. Such links pass less ranking value, but can still send readers and support how a brand is seen.
Keywords a page already ranks for just off the top results, often somewhere between positions 4 and 20. Google already sees the page as relevant, so modest improvements can move it up. They are usually the quickest wins in an existing site.
A Majestic metric, on a scale of 0 to 100, that estimates how trustworthy a site is based on how close its links sit to a set of hand-picked trusted sites. It is often read alongside Majestic's Citation Flow. A big gap between the two can suggest low-quality links.
A search that ends without a click to any website, because the answer was shown on the results page itself. AI Overviews, featured snippets and the map pack all add to it. It is one reason being named in the answer now matters as much as ranking below it.
A senior strategist will look at your rankings, links and AI visibility and tell you the three changes that would move the most.
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