Glossary
Digital marketing terms, defined plainly
18 terms that come up in our reports and proposals, defined without jargon. Each links to where we explain it properly.
Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)
The practice of optimising so AI assistants name and cite your business inside their generated answers, rather than competing for a position in a list of links.
AI Overview
Google's AI-generated summary shown above organic results. It reduces click-through on informational queries considerably more than on commercial ones.
Canonical tag
An HTML tag telling search engines which URL is the preferred version of a page. Misconfigured canonicals are a common cause of pages disappearing from the index.
Core Web Vitals
Three Google metrics measuring page experience: Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift.
Cost per acquisition (CPA)
What you pay in advertising to win one customer. The number that matters, as distinct from cost per click or cost per lead.
Doorway page
A page created only to rank for a location or keyword variation, with no genuinely distinct content. Breaches Google's spam policies.
E-E-A-T
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust — the qualities Google's rater guidelines describe. Named authors with real credentials are the practical expression of it.
Entity
A distinct thing a search engine or AI model can identify and reason about — a business, person or place. Entity clarity is the foundation of AI visibility.
Google Business Profile
The free listing that determines whether you appear in Google Maps and the local map pack.
Keyword cannibalisation
When several pages on one site compete for the same search intent, forcing search engines to choose between them — usually not the page you would pick.
llms.txt
A proposed plain-text file summarising a site for large language models. No major AI platform has committed to reading it, so treat it as low-cost insurance rather than a ranking factor.
Map pack
The block of three local business results shown above organic listings. Rankings are driven by proximity, prominence and relevance.
Negative keyword
A term you exclude from a paid search campaign so your ads stop showing for it. The main tool for cutting wasted ad spend.
Performance Max
A Google Ads campaign type serving across all Google inventory with automated placement and creative assembly.
Schema markup
Structured data in JSON-LD that describes your content to machines explicitly, rather than leaving them to infer it.
Search intent
What someone is actually trying to do when they search — learn, compare, or buy. Matching page type to intent matters more than keyword volume.
Share of voice
The proportion of relevant AI answers or search results in which your brand appears, relative to competitors.
Topic cluster
A group of related pages linking to a central hub page, used to build topical authority and to signal how content relates.
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