Glossary

The terms you meet in the panel, in one or two sentences each. Every entry links to the part of seops where it matters.

#AEO (answer engine optimisation)

Working on whether AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity mention your brand and cite your pages. Also called GEO. It builds on SEO: assistants with web search read the same pages search engines do.

In seops: AI visibility

#AI crawler

A bot that fetches pages for an AI company: for training (GPTBot, ClaudeBot), for a search index (OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot) or on a user's request (ChatGPT-User). Each identifies itself with a user agent you can allow or block.

In seops: AI crawlers · Free tool: AI crawler check

#AI Overview

Google's AI-generated summary shown above some search results, with links to sources. Search Console counts its clicks and impressions inside Web search and does not report it separately.

In seops: Search Console

#AI visibility

In seops: how often AI assistants mention your brand or cite your site when asked the prompts you track, measured weekly as mention rate and citation rate.

In seops: AI visibility

#Average position

Search Console's average of your site's topmost position across impressions. It blends devices, places and result types, so it moves even when no single ranking changed.

In seops: Rank tracking

#Canonical URL

The preferred address among pages with the same content, declared with <link rel="canonical">. It is a hint: Google may pick another one, which URL inspection shows as the Google-selected canonical.

In seops: Site audit · Free tool: Meta tag & social preview

#Citation (in an AI answer)

A link to a source the assistant used for its answer. A mention names you; a citation sends the reader to your page. seops also records where in the source list your site appears.

In seops: AI visibility

#Cloudflare AI Gateway

A Cloudflare service that sits between an application and AI providers, with logging, caching, rate limits and cost tracking. seops sends its AI-visibility questions through it.

In seops: AI visibility

#CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)

A score for how much visible content moves unexpectedly while the page is in use, from the largest burst of shifts. Good is 0.1 or less. Images without dimensions and late banners are common causes.

In seops: Page speed

#Content-Signal

A robots.txt line from Cloudflare's Content Signals Policy that states how your content may be used after it is fetched: search, ai-input (using it in AI answers) and ai-train, each yes or no. It expresses a preference; it does not block anything by itself.

In seops: AI crawlers · Free tool: AI bot blocker generator

#Core Web Vitals

Google's three page-experience metrics: LCP (loading), INP (responsiveness) and CLS (visual stability). A page passes when the 75th percentile of real visits is good on all three.

In seops: Page speed

#Crawl budget

How many URLs a search engine can and wants to crawl on your site in a given time. It mostly matters for very large or fast-changing sites; redirects, duplicate URLs and slow responses waste it.

In seops: Index and IndexNow

#CrUX (field data) and lab data

The Chrome UX Report collects speed measurements from real Chrome users over a rolling 28 days; that is field data. A Lighthouse run in a simulated browser is lab data: repeatable and useful for debugging, but not what visitors experienced.

In seops: Page speed

#CTR (click-through rate)

Clicks divided by impressions. A low CTR at a good position often points to a title and description that don't match the search; seops lists those queries as opportunities.

In seops: Search Console

#hreflang

Annotations that link the language or region versions of a page so search engines show the right one. Every version lists all the others and itself; x-default names the fallback.

In seops: Site audit · Free tool: Meta tag & social preview

#Impression

One appearance of a link to your site in a search result a user loaded. Impressions say you were seen; clicks say you were chosen.

In seops: Search Console

#IndexNow

An open protocol for telling search engines that URLs changed. You host a key file at your root and send the URLs to one participating engine (Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam and others), which shares them. Google does not take part.

In seops: Index and IndexNow · Free tool: IndexNow key check

#INP (Interaction to Next Paint)

How long the page takes to show a response after a click, tap or key press, taken from the slowest interactions of a visit. Good is 200 ms or less. It replaced FID as a Core Web Vital in March 2024. Lab tests have no real users, so they report TBT instead.

In seops: Page speed

#LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)

The time until the largest image or text block in the viewport is drawn. Good is 2.5 seconds or less.

In seops: Page speed

#llms.txt

A proposed Markdown file at the site root that tells language models what the site is and links its most useful pages. It is a proposal, not a standard, and support varies between AI tools.

In seops: AI visibility · Free tool: llms.txt generator

#MCP (Model Context Protocol)

An open protocol, introduced by Anthropic in 2024, that lets AI apps such as Claude, ChatGPT and coding agents call tools and read data on a server. seops runs an MCP server with OAuth, so your assistant can read your reports and work on tasks.

In seops: MCP for your assistant

#noindex

A robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag header that asks search engines not to index a page. A noindex page in your sitemap is a contradiction the site audit flags.

In seops: Site audit · Free tool: Meta tag & social preview

#Query fan-out

The searches an AI assistant runs in the background to answer one prompt. Your page can be found through one of these sub-queries even if it doesn't rank for the prompt itself; seops stores the queries the engine reports.

In seops: AI visibility

#robots.txt

A text file at the site root that tells crawlers which paths they may fetch. It controls crawling, not indexing: a blocked URL can still be indexed from links, and a page must be crawlable for its noindex to be seen. Following it is voluntary.

In seops: AI crawlers · Free tool: robots.txt & sitemap check

#SEO

Search engine optimisation: making a site easy to crawl, index and understand so it shows up for the searches it deserves. Most of it is technical hygiene plus useful content.

In seops: Search Console

#Structured data (JSON-LD)

A machine-readable description of a page in the schema.org vocabulary, usually in a <script type="application/ld+json"> block. It can make a page eligible for rich results; it does not guarantee them.

In seops: Site audit · Free tool: Structured data check

#TTFB (Time to First Byte)

The time from the request until the first byte of the response arrives. It is not a Core Web Vital, but a slow server delays everything after it, including LCP.

In seops: Page speed · Free tool: HTTP response check

#URL Inspection

Search Console's per-URL report: whether Google has the page in its index, the canonical Google chose and when it last crawled. The API allows 2,000 inspections per site per day.

In seops: Index and IndexNow

#WAF (web application firewall)

Rules at the edge that block, challenge or allow requests before they reach your server. A rule that is too broad can also block search crawlers, PageSpeed or AI crawlers; seops shows those blocks next to the rule.

In seops: Cloudflare security and usage · Free tool: Security headers check

#XML sitemap

A file listing the URLs you want indexed, optionally with the last-modified date. One file holds up to 50,000 URLs or 50 MB uncompressed; a sitemap index groups several. seops uses it for the audit, URL inspection and IndexNow.

In seops: Index and IndexNow · Free tool: robots.txt & sitemap check

Data sources and method →