plain-english definitions for SEO, AEO, GEO, PPC, ROAS, CAC, LTV and every other acronym worth knowing.
Terms that govern how brands show up in classical search engines, answer engines, and AI overviews.
SEO is the practice of improving a website's organic visibility on search engines like Google and Bing.
SEO combines technical fixes, on-page content, and off-page authority signals to rank pages for relevant keywords. Done well, it compounds: rankings earned today continue to drive traffic for years. It is typically the highest-ROI long-term acquisition channel for content-driven businesses.
AEO is the practice of structuring a website so search engines can extract direct answers and surface them in featured snippets, voice answers, and AI summaries.
Unlike SEO, which optimises for ranking, AEO optimises for being the answer. It relies on question-shaped headings, concise one-sentence definitions, FAQPage and HowTo schema, and clean semantic HTML. AEO is what gets you cited verbatim in Google's featured snippets and Alexa/Siri voice answers.
GEO is the practice of optimising web content so generative AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews discover, parse, and cite it in their answers.
GEO combines classical SEO with citation-friendly structure: clear semantic markup, rich JSON-LD, fresh timestamps, an llms.txt directory, and explicit allow rules for AI crawlers. The goal is not to rank — it is to become the source AI engines quote when generating answers.
An AI Overview is the generative summary Google places at the top of search results, synthesised from multiple cited sources.
Formerly known as the Search Generative Experience (SGE), AI Overviews answer the user's question directly, often without them clicking through. Being cited inside an AI Overview is the AEO equivalent of ranking #1 — high-visibility, high-authority, but the click-through rate is lower than a classical organic listing.
A featured snippet is a boxed answer Google places above the organic results, extracted verbatim from a ranking page.
Featured snippets reward answer-first content: a question-shaped heading followed by a 40-60 word direct answer wins the box. They are the original AEO target and remain a major source of high-intent traffic, especially for how-to and definition queries.
Technical SEO is the work of making a website crawlable, indexable, fast, and structurally sound for search engines.
It covers site speed, Core Web Vitals, sitemap and robots.txt hygiene, canonical URLs, structured data, internal linking, mobile usability, and HTTPS. Technical SEO is the foundation: even great content cannot rank if the engine cannot crawl or render it.
Local SEO is the practice of optimising a business to rank for location-specific searches like "SEO agency near me" or "digital marketing Vadodara".
It centres on a complete and verified Google Business Profile, consistent name-address-phone citations across the web, location-specific landing pages, and LocalBusiness schema. Local SEO is essential for any business with a physical presence or a city-specific service area.
Core Web Vitals are Google's three performance metrics that measure real-user loading, interactivity, and visual stability: LCP, INP, and CLS.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) tracks how fast the main content loads, Interaction to Next Paint (INP) measures responsiveness, and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability. They are a Google ranking signal and directly affect bounce rate. Hitting the "good" threshold on all three is table-stakes for serious SEO.
Schema markup is machine-readable structured data added to a page that tells search and AI engines exactly what the page is about.
Implemented as JSON-LD (the format recommended by Google), schema describes entities like Articles, Services, Products, FAQs, and Organisations using the schema.org vocabulary. It powers rich results, AI Overviews, and is one of the strongest GEO signals — AI engines preferentially cite content with clean schema.
A sitemap is an XML file at /sitemap.xml that lists every important URL on the site so search engines can discover them efficiently.
Each entry can include a last-modified date, change frequency, and priority. Submitting a sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools is the fastest way to get new content indexed. The sitemap is referenced from robots.txt so crawlers find it automatically.
Robots.txt is a plain-text file at the root of a site that tells crawlers which paths they may or may not access.
It supports per-user-agent rules, so different bots can be given different permissions. For GEO, explicitly allowing AI crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended signals that the site welcomes AI citations — and gives you a single dial to opt out of any specific engine later.
llms.txt is a proposed convention (llmstxt.org) for a plain-text directory file that points AI engines to the most citation-worthy URLs on a site.
Hosted at /llms.txt, it lists canonical pages with one-line summaries so generative AI tools can prioritise what to read. Adoption is still emerging, but it is a low-effort forward investment: tools and engines that respect the convention pick it up automatically without any submission step.
A backlink is a hyperlink from another website pointing to yours, treated by search and AI engines as a vote of trust.
Backlinks remain the single strongest off-page ranking signal in SEO and a major weighting factor in AI engine citations. Quality matters more than quantity: a link from a high-authority publication outweighs hundreds of links from low-quality directories. Earned editorial links from reputable sources are the gold standard.
Domain Authority is a 0-100 score (created by Moz) that predicts how likely a domain is to rank in search results, based primarily on backlink quantity and quality.
DA is not a Google metric — Google does not publish a similar score. But it is a useful industry proxy for site trust. Ahrefs' Domain Rating (DR) and SemRush's Authority Score serve the same purpose. New domains typically start at 1-10 and grow over years as they earn quality backlinks.
Keyword research is the process of finding the exact phrases people search to identify what content to create and what to rank for.
Good keyword research balances search volume, competition, and search intent (informational, navigational, commercial, transactional). The output is a prioritised list of head terms and long-tail variants, mapped to specific pages on the site. Tools include Ahrefs, SemRush, Google Keyword Planner, and Search Console.
A long-tail keyword is a longer, more specific search phrase with lower volume but typically higher intent and lower competition.
For example, "shoes" is a head term; "waterproof trail running shoes for wide feet" is a long-tail variant. Long-tail keywords are easier to rank for and convert better because the searcher already knows what they want. Most B2B SEO programs are built primarily on long-tail capture.
E-E-A-T is Google's framework for evaluating content quality: who wrote it, what qualifies them, how authoritative the publisher is, and whether the source is trustworthy.
It became especially important after the 2022 update that added "Experience" to the original E-A-T. Strong E-E-A-T signals include named authors with credentials, citations to primary sources, transparent publisher information, and consistent factual accuracy. AI engines weight E-E-A-T signals heavily when choosing what to cite.
Terms used in paid advertising, performance marketing, and unit economics.
PPC is a paid advertising model where the advertiser pays each time a user clicks an ad — Google Ads and Meta Ads are the largest platforms.
Unlike SEO, which compounds over time, PPC delivers traffic immediately but stops the moment spend stops. The discipline lies in keyword and audience targeting, ad creative, landing page conversion rate, and bid strategy. PPC and SEO together typically outperform either alone.
Performance marketing is digital advertising bought on measurable outcomes — clicks, leads, sales — rather than impressions or reach.
It spans paid search, paid social, display, affiliate, and influencer marketing, all measured against ROAS or CPA targets. The performance marketer's job is to allocate budget across channels and creative to maximise return — usually with daily optimisation, not monthly.
ROAS is the revenue generated for every rupee (or dollar) spent on advertising — calculated as revenue divided by ad spend.
A ROAS of 4x means ₹4 of revenue for every ₹1 of ad spend. Healthy ROAS depends on margin: an ecommerce brand with a 20% margin needs at least 5x ROAS to break even on the ad spend alone, before accounting for product cost, ops, and overhead.
CAC is the total marketing and sales spend required to acquire one paying customer.
Calculated as (total acquisition spend) / (new customers acquired) over a period. It is the most important unit-economics metric in paid growth: a business is only sustainable if Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) exceeds CAC, typically by a 3:1 ratio for SaaS.
LTV is the total revenue a single customer generates across their entire relationship with the business.
Calculated as average order value × purchase frequency × customer lifespan, adjusted for gross margin. LTV sets the ceiling for how much can profitably be spent on acquisition. The LTV:CAC ratio (target ≥ 3:1) is the single most important health metric for a growth business.
CRO is the practice of increasing the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action — a purchase, signup, or lead form — without increasing traffic.
Tactics include landing page redesigns, copy testing, friction reduction in checkout flows, and pricing experiments — all validated through A/B testing. CRO is the highest-leverage growth lever once traffic is already flowing: doubling conversion rate is functionally the same as doubling traffic at zero extra acquisition cost.
CTR is the percentage of people who click a link, ad, or search result out of everyone who saw it — clicks divided by impressions.
For paid ads, CTR is a major Quality Score input that lowers cost per click. For organic search, CTR is the leading indicator of title-tag and meta-description effectiveness. A page ranked #3 with a 12% CTR can outperform a page ranked #1 with a 4% CTR in absolute traffic.
A/B testing is a controlled experiment that splits traffic between two versions of a page or ad to measure which performs better.
Statistically valid A/B tests need enough sample size to reach significance — typically several hundred conversions per variant. Beyond pages and ads, the technique applies to emails, pricing, and feature rollouts. It is the backbone of disciplined CRO.
Terms used in content marketing, marketplace operations, and conversion.
Content marketing is the practice of attracting and retaining customers by publishing useful, relevant content rather than directly pitching products.
It spans blog articles, long-form guides, case studies, videos, podcasts, and newsletters — each tied to a stage of the buyer journey. Done well, content marketing builds organic search traffic, brand authority, and a moat of compounding assets that paid acquisition cannot match.
Marketplace management is the ongoing optimisation of a brand's presence on platforms like Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, and Meesho.
It covers listing content (titles, bullets, A+ content), pricing strategy, sponsored ads (ACOS optimisation), brand stores, inventory and FBA logistics, and review management. For D2C brands in India, marketplace channels often outperform the brand's own website on both volume and CAC.
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