SEO & GEO glossary

The vocabulary used across Sealyx reports — every term explained in plain language, with the reason it matters for search and AI visibility.

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Search basics

SEO: Search engine optimisation — making a page findable, crawlable and understandable so search engines can rank it.
SERP: Search engine results page — everything a search engine returns for a query: organic links, ads, featured snippets, maps and answer boxes. Ranking well means owning more of this page, not just one blue link.
PAA: People Also Ask — the expandable question boxes inside Google results. Each question is a real follow-up users ask, which makes PAA a free source of content ideas and an extra slot your page can appear in.
Featured snippet: The answer box Google shows above the first result, extracted from a page that answers the question concisely. Short, direct answers of roughly 40–60 words are the easiest to extract.
Organic CTR: The share of people who see your result and click it. A strong title and description can double traffic without any ranking change.
Impression: One appearance of your page in search results, whether or not anyone clicked. Growing impressions with flat clicks usually means your snippet is not compelling.
Indexing: A search engine storing your page in its database. A page that is not indexed cannot rank at all — this is the first thing a diagnosis checks.
Crawling: A bot fetching your pages to discover content. Crawl budget, broken links and JavaScript-only rendering all decide how much of your site actually gets seen.
Long-tail keyword: A specific, lower-volume search phrase such as 'seo audit for nextjs saas'. Individually small, collectively the majority of searches — and far easier to win.
Backlink: A link from another site to yours. Still one of the strongest ranking signals; quality and relevance of the linking site matter more than count.
E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness — the quality lens Google's guidelines use. Named authors, real evidence and accurate claims all feed it.

On-page & technical

Title tag: The page title shown as the blue link in search results. The single highest-leverage on-page element: unique, specific and under ~60 characters.
Meta description: The summary text under your title in search results. It does not rank pages directly but strongly influences whether people click.
Canonical: A tag telling engines which URL is the master copy when the same content exists at several addresses. A wrong canonical can make your best page invisible.
robots.txt: A file at your domain root telling bots what they may fetch. Blocking the wrong path removes pages from search entirely.
sitemap.xml: A machine-readable list of your important URLs that helps engines discover and re-crawl pages quickly.
noindex: A directive telling engines not to index a page. Essential for staging — and a classic cause of 'my site disappeared from Google' when it leaks into production.
Structured data (JSON-LD): Machine-readable markup describing what a page is — a product, article, FAQ. It unlocks rich results and gives AI engines quotable facts.
Open Graph: Meta tags controlling the title, description and image shown when your link is shared on social platforms and chat apps.
SSR / CSR / Hydration: Server-side rendering delivers complete HTML crawlers can read immediately. Client-side rendering ships an empty shell filled by JavaScript — most crawlers and AI agents never run it, so the page looks blank to them.
Core Web Vitals: Google's page-experience metrics: loading (LCP), interactivity (INP) and visual stability (CLS). Slow or jumpy pages rank worse and convert worse.
Semantic HTML: Using the right elements — h1, nav, article, ul — so crawlers and AI agents understand your structure instead of guessing from divs.

AI search & GEO

GEO: Generative engine optimisation — making your product likely to be named and cited inside AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Gemini and others.
AI citation: An AI answer naming or linking your product as a source. The GEO equivalent of a ranking — and the metric Sealyx tracks across assistants.
Mention rate: The share of buyer questions where an AI assistant mentions your brand. Assistants are non-deterministic, so a rate across many prompts is meaningful; a single answer is not.
llms.txt: A plain-text file at your domain root describing what you sell, who it is for and what it costs — written for language models, in the spirit of robots.txt.
AI crawler: Bots such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended that fetch your pages to train or answer with. Blocking them removes you from the answers those assistants generate.
Answer engine: Any system that writes a direct answer instead of listing links — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot. Optimising for them means quotable facts, clear positioning and crawlable text.

Measurement

Search Console: Google's free report of your real search performance: queries, impressions, clicks and average position. The ground truth every traffic chart on Sealyx is built from.
GA4: Google Analytics 4 — what visitors do after they arrive: pages viewed, conversions, retention. Paired with Search Console it connects rankings to revenue.
Average position: The mean ranking of your page across the queries where it appeared. Treat it as a trend line, not an exact rank for any one search.
Bottleneck: The one dimension of your diagnosis whose low score is limiting growth the most right now — the thing to fix first.