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Numbers and HTTP Status Codes

200 OK

A 200 status code means a server successfully received a request and returned the requested page or resource. For SEO, a normal indexable webpage will usually return a 200 HTTP response.

301 Redirect

A 301 redirect permanently sends visitors and search engines from one URL to another. It is commonly used when pages are moved, merged, renamed, or replaced.

302 Redirect

A 302 redirect indicates that a URL has been redirected temporarily. Search engines may treat temporary redirects differently from permanent redirects when deciding which URL should remain indexed.

404 Not Found

A 404 status code means the server could not find the requested URL. Having some 404 pages is normal, but broken internal links and valuable URLs that unexpectedly return 404 errors can create SEO and usability problems.

410 Gone

A 410 status code tells a browser or search engine that a resource has intentionally been removed and is no longer available.

5xx Server Error

A 5xx status code indicates a server-side problem that prevented a request from being completed. Frequent or prolonged server errors can interfere with crawling and prevent users from reaching a website.

A

A/B Testing

A/B testing, or split testing, compares two versions of a webpage or page element to determine which performs better for a defined metric such as conversions or engagement.

AEO

AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization. The term is used for strategies intended to improve a brand or website’s visibility in direct answers produced by search engines and AI systems.

Google recognizes AEO as terminology used in the industry but considers optimization for Google’s generative search experiences part of SEO rather than a separate requirement.

AI Citation

An AI citation occurs when an AI-generated answer references, links to, or attributes information to a particular website or source.

AI citations are becoming an additional visibility metric alongside traditional rankings, impressions, clicks, and organic traffic.

AI Mode

AI Mode is Google’s generative search experience designed to answer more complex, exploratory, and multi-step searches.

From a website owner’s perspective, the underlying SEO fundamentals remain important: content must still be accessible, understandable, useful, and eligible to appear in Google Search.

AI Overview

An AI Overview is an AI-generated response that Google may display within search results for some queries. AI Overviews can synthesize information from multiple sources and provide links to supporting webpages.

AI Search

AI search refers broadly to search and discovery experiences that use generative AI or large language models to formulate responses rather than only presenting a traditional ranked list of links.

Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT search experiences, Perplexity, and similar systems fall within the broader AI search category.

Algorithm

An algorithm is a set of computational rules or processes used to solve a problem or make decisions.

Search engines use many algorithms and automated systems to crawl, understand, evaluate, retrieve, and rank webpages.

Alt Text

Alt text, short for alternative text, describes an image in text form. Its primary purpose is accessibility, particularly for people using screen readers, and it can also help search engines understand image content.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the visible, clickable text used in a hyperlink.

Descriptive anchor text can help users and search engines understand what they should expect to find on the linked page.

Authority

Authority is an informal SEO concept describing how credible or influential a website, page, brand, or source appears within a subject area.

There is no universal Google “authority score.” SEO platforms often create their own metrics to estimate different aspects of authority.

B

Backlink

A backlink is a link from another website to your website.

Search engines can use links to discover pages and understand relationships between websites. Relevant links from reputable websites may also contribute to how search engines evaluate pages.

Black Hat SEO

Black hat SEO describes tactics designed primarily to manipulate search rankings in ways that violate search engine spam policies.

Examples can include certain forms of link manipulation, cloaking, hacked content, and scaled low-value content.

Branded Search

A branded search is a query that contains a company, product, person, or other brand name, such as a search for “Unified SEO.”

Branded search demand can be useful for understanding brand awareness and how people search specifically for an organization.

Breadcrumb

A breadcrumb is a navigational trail showing a page’s position within a website hierarchy, such as:

Home > Resources > SEO Glossary

Breadcrumbs can help users navigate a site and help search engines understand page relationships.

Broken Link

A broken link is a hyperlink that points to a destination that is unavailable or incorrect.

Broken internal links can make websites harder for users and crawlers to navigate.

C

Canonical URL

A canonical URL is the URL selected as the representative version of a page when multiple URLs contain duplicate or very similar content.

A website can signal its preferred version with rel="canonical", although search engines ultimately determine which URL they consider canonical.

Canonicalization

Canonicalization is the process of selecting a representative URL from a group of duplicate or substantially similar URLs.

Citation

In local SEO, a citation is an online mention of a business, often including its name, address, telephone number, or other identifying information.

In AI search, the word citation usually refers to a source referenced by an AI-generated answer. Context matters because the same term is used differently in these two areas of SEO.

Click

A click occurs when someone selects a search result and visits the associated destination.

Google Search Console reports clicks separately from impressions.

Click-Through Rate

Click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of impressions that result in clicks.

If a search result receives 1,000 impressions and 50 clicks, its CTR is 5%.

CLS

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is a Core Web Vitals metric that measures unexpected visual movement while a page is loading or being used.

Content Cluster

A content cluster is a group of related pages organized around a broader subject.

A strong cluster usually includes internal links that make the relationships among the pages clear to users and search engines.

Content Decay

Content decay describes a decline in a webpage’s organic visibility or performance over time.

Decay can happen because information becomes outdated, competitors improve, search intent changes, links disappear, or search results evolve.

Conversion

A conversion occurs when a visitor completes an action considered valuable to a business, such as submitting a form, making a purchase, booking an appointment, or calling a company.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is the percentage of users or sessions that complete a defined conversion action.

Core Update

A Google core update is a broad change Google makes to its core search ranking systems.

A period of ranking volatility should not automatically be called a core update. Google publicly confirms core updates when they occur.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are metrics Google uses to measure aspects of real-world webpage experience, including loading performance, responsiveness, and visual stability.

The current Core Web Vitals are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

Crawl Budget

Crawl budget is an SEO term associated with how much crawling a search engine is willing and able to perform on a website.

For Google, crawling is influenced by factors including crawl capacity and crawl demand. Crawl-budget optimization is usually much more important for very large or rapidly changing websites than for small business websites.

Crawl Depth

Crawl depth describes how many link steps separate a webpage from a starting point such as the homepage.

Important pages buried many clicks deep can be harder for users and crawlers to discover than pages integrated clearly into site navigation.

Crawler

A crawler, also called a bot or spider, is software that automatically visits URLs and retrieves web content.

Google’s primary search crawler is Googlebot.

Crawling

Crawling is the process through which search engines discover and retrieve webpages and other web resources.

Crawling does not guarantee indexing. A search engine can crawl a page and later decide not to include it in its searchable index. See our full guide: How Search Engines Work.

D

Deindexing

Deindexing means removing a webpage or other resource from a search engine’s index.

A page that has been deindexed is generally no longer eligible to appear as a normal organic search result.

Disavow

Google’s Disavow Links tool allows site owners to ask Google to disregard specified backlinks when evaluating a website.

It is an advanced tool intended for unusual situations involving problematic link activity and should not be treated as routine backlink maintenance.

Domain

A domain is the main web address associated with a website, such as example.com.

Individual pages exist at URLs within that domain.

Domain Authority

Domain Authority (DA) is a proprietary metric developed by Moz to estimate a domain’s ability to rank relative to other domains.

Domain Authority is not a Google metric and is not a Google ranking factor. Other SEO platforms have created similar proprietary authority metrics.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content occurs when identical or substantially similar content can be accessed through multiple URLs.

Duplicate content is not automatically a spam violation, but it can create canonicalization and crawling inefficiencies.

E

E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

Google’s search quality raters use E-E-A-T concepts when evaluating search result quality. E-E-A-T should not be treated as a single measurable ranking factor or score.

Entity

An entity is a distinct person, place, organization, product, concept, or other thing that can be identified independently.

Modern search systems often need to understand not only words but which real-world entities those words refer to and how the entities relate to one another.

External Link

An external link is a hyperlink from one website or domain to another.

Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is content designed to remain useful for a long period rather than becoming obsolete soon after publication.

Glossaries, foundational guides, definitions, and instructional resources are common evergreen content formats.

F

Faceted Navigation

Faceted navigation allows users to filter a collection of pages or products by attributes such as price, size, brand, category, or location.

Large combinations of filters can generate huge numbers of URLs, making faceted navigation an important technical SEO issue on ecommerce and large database-driven sites.

Featured Snippet

A featured snippet is a search result format in which Google prominently displays an extracted answer or passage from a webpage.

First-Party Data

First-party data is information a business collects directly from its own customers, users, research, transactions, or systems.

Original first-party information can differentiate content from pages that merely repeat what is already available elsewhere.

G

GA4

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is Google’s web and app analytics platform.

GA4 can be used to measure website sessions, users, events, conversions, traffic sources, landing pages, and other behavioral data.

Generative AI

Generative AI refers to artificial intelligence systems capable of producing new content such as text, images, code, audio, or video in response to prompts or other inputs.

GEO

GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization.

The term generally describes attempts to improve how a company, brand, product, or source appears within generative AI answers.

Google acknowledges GEO as an industry term but states that optimization for Google’s generative search experiences remains part of SEO.

Googlebot

Googlebot is the name for Google’s primary web crawling software.

Googlebot discovers and retrieves webpages and resources that may later be processed by Google’s indexing systems.

Google Business Profile

A Google Business Profile is the business listing used to manage how eligible businesses appear across local Google Search and Google Maps experiences.

A profile can include information such as business category, address or service area, hours, telephone number, photos, reviews, and services.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console (GSC) is Google’s platform for monitoring how a website performs in Google Search.

It provides information about search impressions, clicks, queries, pages, indexing, crawling, Core Web Vitals, structured data, and other search-related issues.

Grounding

Grounding is the process of connecting an AI-generated response to external information, retrieved documents, databases, tools, or other supporting evidence.

Grounded AI answers may use retrieved web sources to support or verify claims rather than relying only on information stored within a model.

H

Heading Tags

Heading tags are HTML elements such as H1, H2, H3, and H4 that create a hierarchy within webpage content.

Headings improve readability and can help browsers, assistive technologies, and search systems understand how sections relate to one another.

Hreflang

Hreflang is an HTML annotation used to identify alternate language or regional versions of a webpage.

International websites use hreflang to help Google understand which version is most appropriate for different users.

HTTPS

HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP and encrypts information transferred between a browser and web server.

HTML

HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, is the standard markup language used to structure webpages.

Many SEO elements, including title tags, headings, links, canonical elements, and robots meta directives, are represented through HTML.

I

Impression

An impression occurs when a search result is displayed or otherwise counted as visible according to the reporting platform’s measurement rules.

Google Search Console reports impressions separately from clicks.

Index

A search index is the database or collection of information a search engine has processed and made available for retrieval.

A webpage normally needs to be indexed before it can appear as a conventional organic result.

Indexability

Indexability describes whether a webpage is technically eligible to be indexed by a search engine.

A page may be crawlable but not indexable because of a noindex directive or other indexing decision.

Indexing

Indexing is the process through which a search engine analyzes retrieved content and may store information about it within its search index. Learn more in our guide: How Search Engines Work.

INP

Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is a Core Web Vitals metric measuring how responsive a page is to user interactions.

Internal Link

An internal link connects one page on a website to another page on the same website.

Internal links help users navigate, allow crawlers to discover content, communicate relationships between pages, and distribute link signals throughout a site.

J

JavaScript SEO

JavaScript SEO is the practice of identifying and fixing search problems associated with websites that depend heavily on JavaScript to generate, modify, or display content.

Important considerations can include crawling, rendering, internal links, canonicals, and whether critical content is available to search engines.

JSON-LD

JSON-LD stands for JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data.

It is a structured-data format commonly used to express entities and relationships using vocabularies such as Schema.org.

K

Keyword

A keyword is a word or phrase an SEO campaign associates with searches it wants a webpage or website to appear for.

In practice, users enter search queries, while marketers often use the word keyword to describe the queries or topic areas they are targeting.

Keyword Cannibalization

Keyword cannibalization occurs when multiple pages on the same website compete unnecessarily for the same search intent.

The problem is not simply that two pages mention the same keyword. Cannibalization becomes an issue when the pages substantially overlap in purpose and compete with one another.

Keyword Density

Keyword density is the percentage of words on a page represented by a particular keyword or phrase.

Modern SEO does not require a universal target keyword-density percentage. Writing naturally and covering the relevant topic is more useful than trying to reach an arbitrary repetition threshold.

Keyword Difficulty

Keyword Difficulty (KD) is a proprietary SEO-tool metric intended to estimate how difficult it may be to rank for a query.

Different SEO platforms calculate keyword difficulty differently, so KD values are not directly comparable across tools and are not Google metrics.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is the process of identifying the searches, questions, topics, and language used by a target audience.

Effective keyword research considers more than search volume. Search intent, competition, business relevance, conversion potential, and SERP composition also matter.

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is the excessive or unnatural repetition of keywords or phrases in an attempt to manipulate search visibility.

Knowledge Graph

A knowledge graph is a structured representation of entities and the relationships among them.

Knowledge graphs allow systems to model information such as a person working for an organization, a company selling a product, or a business being located in a particular city.

Knowledge Panel

A knowledge panel is an informational panel Google may display for recognized entities such as people, organizations, places, or businesses.

L

Landing Page

A landing page is the page a visitor first enters during a session or a page specifically designed to receive traffic from a particular campaign, search intent, audience, or offer.

Largest Contentful Paint

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is a Core Web Vitals metric that measures how quickly the largest visible content element in the viewport is rendered.

Link Equity

Link equity is an informal SEO term for ranking value or signals that may pass through links from one webpage to another.

It is often casually called “link juice,” although link equity is the more professional term.

Link Spam

Link spam refers to links created primarily to manipulate search rankings in ways that violate search engine spam policies.

Local Citation

A local citation is an online reference to a business, typically involving identifying information such as its business name, address, telephone number, or website.

Local Pack

The local pack, sometimes called the map pack, is a Google search feature that displays a group of local business results associated with a geographic search.

Local SEO

Local SEO is the practice of improving a business’s visibility for searches connected to a geographic area.

Local SEO commonly involves Google Business Profile optimization, localized website content, reviews, citations, links, and accurate business information.

Local Ranking Factors

Google states that local results are mainly determined by relevance, distance, and prominence.

Relevance concerns how well a business matches a search, distance concerns geographic proximity, and prominence concerns how well known or established the business appears.

Long-Tail Keyword

A long-tail keyword is a relatively specific search query, usually reflecting a narrower need or intent than a broad head term.

Long-tail queries do not necessarily need to contain a large number of words.

LLM

LLM stands for Large Language Model.

An LLM is a type of machine-learning model trained on large amounts of data to process and generate language.

llms.txt

llms.txt is a proposed website convention intended to provide AI systems with a curated, machine-readable overview of important website content.

It is not an official W3C or IETF web standard, and Google states that Google Search does not use llms.txt as a special mechanism for inclusion in its traditional or generative search features.

M

Manual Action

A manual action occurs when a human reviewer at Google determines that a website or page violates Google’s spam policies and applies a search-related action.

Manual actions can be viewed in Google Search Console.

Meta Description

A meta description is HTML metadata describing the content of a webpage.

Search engines may use a page’s meta description when generating its search snippet, although they can also select other page content when it better matches a query.

Mobile-First Indexing

Mobile-first indexing means Google primarily uses the mobile version of a webpage’s content for indexing and ranking.

Modifier

A keyword modifier is a word or phrase added to a broader search concept to make it more specific.

Examples include location modifiers, service modifiers, audience modifiers, and comparison terms such as “near me,” “Phoenix,” “for small businesses,” or “vs.”

N

NAP

NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone number.

The term is commonly used in local SEO when discussing the consistency and accuracy of a business’s identifying information across its website and external listings.

Nofollow

Nofollow is a link relationship attribute that can indicate that a website does not want to imply a normal association with the linked destination.

Google also supports more specific attributes such as sponsored for paid links and ugc for user-generated links.

Noindex

Noindex is a directive telling a search engine not to include a page in its search index.

A noindexed page can still potentially be crawled.

Nosnippet

Nosnippet is a search directive that tells Google not to display a text or video preview for the page in search results.

More restrictive snippet controls can also affect how content is used in Google’s AI search experiences.

O

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to efforts outside a website that may improve its reputation, authority, or search visibility.

Common areas include backlinks, digital PR, brand mentions, partnerships, and external citations.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO refers to optimizing the content and HTML elements of webpages.

Typical on-page SEO work includes content optimization, titles, headings, internal links, image information, semantic clarity, and search-intent alignment.

Organic Search

Organic search refers to unpaid search engine results rather than paid advertisements.

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is website traffic generated through unpaid search results.

Orphan Page

An orphan page is a webpage that has no meaningful internal links pointing to it.

Orphan pages can be difficult for users and crawlers to discover through the normal site structure.

P

Page Experience

Page experience describes aspects of how users experience and interact with a webpage.

Google recommends considering factors such as Core Web Vitals, secure delivery, mobile usability, intrusive interstitials, and whether users can easily distinguish the primary content.

PageRank

PageRank is a foundational Google system that evaluates links among webpages as part of understanding their relative importance.

Modern Google Search uses many systems and signals beyond PageRank.

People Also Ask

People Also Ask (PAA) is a Google search feature containing expandable questions related to a user’s search.

The questions can be useful for understanding related search intents, although PAA results should not be treated as a direct list of keyword-search-volume data.

Programmatic SEO

Programmatic SEO is the creation of large numbers of search-focused pages using structured data, templates, databases, or automation.

Programmatic SEO can be useful when pages represent genuinely distinct information or intent. Automatically creating large quantities of low-value pages can instead create quality and spam risks.

Prominence

Prominence is one of the factors Google says influences local results.

Prominence broadly reflects how well known a business is, using information Google has about that business from across the web.

Q

Query

A query, or search query, is the actual word, phrase, question, or other input a user submits to a search engine.

A keyword is usually the marketer’s target; a query is what the user actually searched.

R

Ranking

Ranking is the ordering of search results for a particular query.

Rankings can vary by location, device, language, personalization, search features, time, and other context. See how ranking fits into the bigger picture in our guide: How Search Engines Work.

Ranking Factor

A ranking factor is a signal or consideration that contributes to how a search system determines the ordering or visibility of results.

SEO discussions frequently label things as ranking factors without evidence, so the term should be used carefully.

Redirect

A redirect automatically sends a browser or crawler from one URL to another URL.

Common redirect types include 301 permanent redirects and 302 temporary redirects.

Referring Domain

A referring domain is a website or domain containing at least one backlink to another website.

A website with 100 backlinks from one domain has 100 backlinks but only one referring domain from that source.

Rendering

Rendering is the process of processing webpage resources such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into the content and layout a browser or search system can interpret.

Retrieval

Retrieval is the process of finding information or documents considered relevant to a particular request.

In AI search and retrieval-augmented generation, retrieval commonly occurs before an AI system generates its final response.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is an AI architecture in which a system retrieves external information and supplies it as context to a generative model before an answer is produced.

RAG can help AI systems answer questions using information that is more specific or current than the model’s internal knowledge alone.

Rich Result

A rich result is an enhanced Google search result that can include information or visual elements beyond a standard text result.

Structured data can make webpages eligible for certain rich-result experiences, but valid structured data does not guarantee that Google will display a rich result.

Robots Meta Tag

A robots meta tag is HTML metadata containing directives that control how search engines may index or display a webpage.

Common directives include noindex, nofollow, nosnippet, and snippet-length controls.

robots.txt

A robots.txt file controls which URLs certain web crawlers are permitted to request.

Robots.txt is primarily a crawling control. It should not be treated as a reliable method for removing an otherwise discoverable URL from Google’s search index.

S

Schema Markup

Schema markup is structured data created using the Schema.org vocabulary.

Schema markup can explicitly describe entities such as organizations, people, products, articles, events, and local businesses along with relationships and properties associated with those entities.

Schema.org

Schema.org is a shared vocabulary for describing entities, properties, actions, and relationships in structured data.

Schema.org vocabulary can be expressed using formats including JSON-LD, Microdata, and RDFa.

Search Engine

A search engine is a system that discovers, organizes, retrieves, and presents information in response to user searches.

Google and Bing are traditional web search engines, while newer discovery systems may combine traditional retrieval with generative AI.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of improving a website and its content so search engines can understand it and relevant users can discover it through unpaid search experiences.

SEO can include technical SEO, content strategy, on-page optimization, local SEO, internal linking, authority development, analytics, and AI-search visibility. For a fuller introduction, see our guide: What Is SEO?

Search Essentials

Google Search Essentials are Google’s core technical requirements, spam policies, and key best practices for websites seeking visibility in Google Search.

Search Intent

Search intent is the purpose behind a user’s search.

Common intent classifications include informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional searches, although real searches can contain more than one intent.

Search Query

A search query is the actual input entered or submitted to a search system.

See also: Query and Keyword.

Search Volume

Search volume is an estimate of how often a keyword or query is searched during a particular period.

Search volume figures are estimates and can differ substantially between keyword-research tools.

Semantic SEO

Semantic SEO is an approach to SEO focused on meaning, entities, concepts, attributes, and relationships rather than simply repeating exact-match keywords.

Semantic Triple

A semantic triple represents information in a subject-predicate-object structure.

For example:

Unified SEO → provides → SEO services

Semantic triples are fundamental to RDF and knowledge-graph data models. The broader SEO principle is that clearly stating who or what is doing something, and to whom or what, reduces ambiguity.

SERP

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page.

A SERP can contain organic results, advertisements, local results, images, videos, AI-generated features, featured snippets, knowledge panels, and other search features.

SERP Feature

A SERP feature is a search result format or element that differs from a traditional organic text result.

Examples include local packs, featured snippets, image results, knowledge panels, AI Overviews, and People Also Ask boxes.

SERP Volatility

SERP volatility describes unusually large or widespread movement in search rankings.

Volatility can occur for many reasons and should not automatically be described as a confirmed Google algorithm update.

Sitemap

A sitemap is a file that provides search engines with information about pages, videos, images, or other files on a website and the relationships among them.

Submitting a sitemap helps discovery but does not guarantee crawling or indexing.

Spam Update

A spam update is a confirmed Google update intended to improve Google’s systems for identifying search spam.

An unconfirmed ranking fluctuation should not be called a spam update.

Structured Data

Structured data is machine-readable information added to content using a standardized format and vocabulary.

Google uses supported structured data to better understand webpage content and to determine eligibility for certain search features.

Subdomain

A subdomain is a domain subdivision appearing before the main domain name, such as blog.example.com.

Search engines can understand relationships between subdomains and root domains, but subdomains can still develop different content, linking, and technical characteristics.

T

Technical SEO

Technical SEO focuses on the technical systems that affect how search engines access, crawl, render, understand, and index a website.

Typical technical SEO issues include crawling, indexation, canonicalization, redirects, JavaScript, internal architecture, performance, structured data, and HTTP responses.

Title Tag

A title tag is the HTML element specifying a webpage’s title.

Search engines can use title tags when generating the clickable title shown in search results, although they may generate alternative title links when appropriate.

Topical Authority

Topical authority is an SEO concept describing the depth, credibility, and interconnected coverage a website or source has around a subject.

There is no public Google “topical authority score.”

Transactional Search Intent

Transactional intent describes searches where the user appears ready to complete an action such as purchasing, booking, calling, downloading, or signing up.

U

UGC

UGC stands for user-generated content.

Examples include comments, forum posts, reviews, and community submissions.

In link markup, rel="ugc" can also be used to identify links appearing within user-generated content.

URL

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator.

A URL is the web address identifying a particular webpage, file, image, API endpoint, or other resource.

URL Slug

A URL slug is the human-readable portion of a URL identifying a specific page, such as seo-glossary in a page address ending with /seo-glossary/.

V

Vector Embedding

A vector embedding is a numerical representation of information such as text, images, or entities in a multidimensional space.

Embedding-based retrieval systems can compare vectors to identify content with similar meaning even when the wording is not identical.

Visibility

Search visibility describes how frequently or prominently a website, page, or brand appears across relevant search experiences.

Modern visibility can include traditional organic rankings, local results, featured snippets, AI citations, AI-generated answers, and other search features.

W

White Hat SEO

White hat SEO is an informal term for optimization strategies intended to improve search performance while remaining consistent with search-engine guidelines.

Web Crawler

A web crawler is software that automatically visits webpages and follows links to discover or retrieve additional web content.

See also: Crawler and Googlebot.

X

XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is a sitemap written in XML format that lists URLs and optional information about those URLs for search engines.

Sitemaps help search engines discover important URLs but do not guarantee that the listed pages will be indexed.

Y

YMYL

YMYL stands for Your Money or Your Life.

The term is used in Google’s quality evaluation framework for subjects that can significantly affect people’s health, financial stability, safety, or welfare. Accuracy and trust are especially important for content in these areas.

Z

Zero-Click Search

A zero-click search is a search in which the user does not click through from the search results to an external webpage.

The user may obtain the information directly from a search feature, refine the query, leave the results page, interact with a local feature, or use an AI-generated answer instead.