Reference

Every SEO term, in plain English.

Every term you'll meet across seodada and the wider industry — classic SEO, technical, and the AI era — defined in plain language.

The AI era: AEO & GEO

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization): Optimizing content so answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews — cite it when they answer a question directly. Where classic SEO competes for a ranking position, AEO competes for the citation inside the answer itself.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): The broader practice of making a brand visible in generatively-produced search results. GEO covers how language models learn about, describe, and recommend a brand — including content structure, entity clarity, and the sources models tend to trust.
AI Overview: Google's generated summary shown above classic results. It synthesizes several sources and links a handful of citations; pages cited in it receive visibility even when they rank below the fold — and pages that are not cited lose clicks even at #1.
Citation share: Of the answers an AI engine gives for a set of queries, the fraction that cite a given domain. The AI-era counterpart of rank tracking: it measures presence in the answer rather than position on a page.
LLM visibility: How often and how favourably large language models mention a brand when asked relevant questions. Distinct from search rankings — a model may recommend brands it learned about in training data regardless of their current SERP position.
Share of voice: A brand's portion of the total visibility available in a market — across rankings, mentions, or AI citations — relative to competitors. A share-of-voice trend tells you whether you are winning ground or merely growing with the market.

Classic search

SERP (Search Engine Results Page): The page of results returned for a query, including organic listings, ads, and features such as the map pack, featured snippets, and AI Overviews. Modern rank tracking maps which features appear, not just who holds position one.
Keyword difficulty: An estimate of how hard it is to rank on the first page for a keyword, usually derived from the authority of the pages currently ranking. Useful for prioritisation: high-volume, low-difficulty terms are the classic opportunity quadrant.
Search intent: What the searcher is actually trying to do — learn (informational), find a site (navigational), compare (commercial), or buy (transactional). Content that mismatches intent rarely ranks regardless of quality.
Backlink: A link from another site to yours. Search engines treat editorially-earned links as endorsements; the count of distinct referring domains matters more than raw link volume, and anchor text signals what the target page is about.
Domain authority: A third-party estimate of a domain's overall ranking strength, modelled mainly on its backlink profile. Search engines do not use these scores directly; they are comparative tools for judging sites against each other.
Organic traffic: Visits arriving from unpaid search results. The core outcome metric of SEO, usually read alongside the keywords and pages that earn it.

Technical & on-page

Technical SEO: Making a site crawlable, indexable, and fast: status codes, redirects, canonical tags, sitemaps, structured data, and rendering. Technical problems cap the results of every other SEO effort, which is why audits start here.
Crawl budget: The number of URLs a search engine will fetch from a site in a given period. Wasting it on duplicates, redirect chains, or broken pages delays the discovery of content that matters — a real constraint mainly for large sites.
Canonical tag: A link element that names the definitive URL among duplicates or near-duplicates, consolidating ranking signals onto one address. A sitemap that disagrees with the pages' canonicals is largely ignored.
Structured data (schema): Machine-readable JSON-LD describing what a page contains — an article, product, FAQ, or price list. It powers rich results, and answer engines lean on it to extract facts with confidence.
Core Web Vitals: Google's user-experience metrics: LCP (loading), INP (interactivity), and CLS (visual stability), measured on real users. A ranking factor at the margin and a conversion factor everywhere.
On-page SEO: Everything controllable within a single page: title and meta description, heading hierarchy, internal links, image alt text, and how well the copy covers the topic. The first thing to fix because it needs no one's permission.
E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness — the lens of Google's quality guidelines. Not a direct ranking signal but the standard content is evaluated against, and increasingly what answer engines proxy when choosing whom to cite.