SEO Acronyms and Definitions, Explained in Plain English

SEO acronyms are the shorthand search marketers use for the things they measure and build. The ones that come up in almost every conversation are SEO (search engine optimization), SERP (search engine results page), CTR (click-through rate), CRO (conversion rate optimization), PPC (pay-per-click), GBP (Google Business Profile), GSC (Google Search Console), and E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness).

Below is the full list, grouped alphabetically, with the status codes and non-acronym terms you will also hear. Six entries near the end are ones that circulate widely and are either out of date or simply wrong, so they are worth reading even if you skip the rest.

The 15 SEO acronyms you actually need

If you only learn fifteen, learn these. They cover roughly every sentence in a normal agency status call.

Everything after this is detail. If a term below is unfamiliar in a meeting, ask. Any agency that will not define its own jargon is hiding behind it.

SEO acronyms A to C

This block covers accessibility law, ad-pricing models, and the analytics abbreviations that appear on almost every report.

SEO acronyms D to G

Most of the third-party authority metrics live in this block, and none of them are Google metrics. That distinction matters when someone quotes one at you.

SEO acronyms H to L

Heading tags, protocols, and the measurement abbreviations that turn up in technical audits sit here.

SEO acronyms M to R

The local SEO vocabulary concentrates in this block, along with the reporting metrics clients are usually shown.

SEO acronyms beginning with S

S is the crowded letter in search marketing, and several of these get confused with each other regularly.

SEO acronyms T to Z

The last block covers domains, tracking, accessibility standards, and the content-quality categories Google treats most carefully.

HTTP status codes you will hear in a site audit

These are not acronyms, but they come up in every technical conversation and every migration. The first two decide entire SEO outcomes.

If you are moving a site, the 301 row is the whole game. Every old address needs a permanent redirect to its new equivalent, or the rankings that address earned disappear quietly on launch day.

SEO terms that are not acronyms

The rest of the jargon is plain words used in a specific way. These are the ones clients most often ask us to repeat.

Cannibalisation is the one worth remembering. It is the most common self-inflicted problem we find on sites that have published for years without a plan, and our post on using Quora for SEO touches on the same competing-page issue from a different angle.

Six acronyms that are out of date or simply wrong

Glossaries copy each other, so obsolete entries survive for years. These six circulate constantly and each one is worth correcting.

• EAT is now E-E-A-T. Google's Search Central post announcing the quality rater guidelines update in December 2022 added a first E for Experience, meaning first-hand knowledge of the subject. Anyone still writing E-A-T is quoting a four-year-old framework. There is more detail in our post on Google's E-E-A-T framework.
• AMP is not required for anything. Google's own AMP documentation states that Search "indexes AMP pages just like other web pages, and applies the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build the page". Building AMP versions for ranking reasons is wasted effort.
• LSI keywords are not a Google technology. Latent semantic indexing is a real information-retrieval technique from the late 1980s. It is not what Google uses, and no tool can generate "LSI keywords" for it. Use related terms because they help readers, not because of the acronym.
• SDTT no longer exists as a Google tool. The Structured Data Testing Tool was handed over and now lives as the Schema Markup Validator at schema.org. For Google-specific checks, use the Rich Results Test instead.
• GMB is now GBP. Google My Business was renamed Google Business Profile in 2021. The name persists in conversation and in a great deal of stale advice.
• DA and DR are not Google scores. Domain Authority belongs to Moz and Domain Rating to Ahrefs. Both are useful for comparison between sites. Neither appears anywhere in Google's systems, and no agency can promise to raise one directly.

The new acronyms: AEO, GEO, and answer engines

A fresh set of abbreviations arrived with AI answers, and they are already showing up in proposals. Two are worth knowing and one is mostly a rebrand.

AEO, answer engine optimization, means structuring a page so an AI system can lift a clean answer from it: a direct response near the top, consistent facts, and headings that match how people ask. GEO, generative engine optimization, is the broader work of being cited by systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, and AI Overviews, which depends heavily on off-site mentions rather than on-page tuning alone. LLMO and AIO turn up as synonyms for one or both, and they carry no additional meaning.

None of this replaces SEO. The same crawlable, well-structured, factually specific page is what both systems reward, which is why our answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization work sits alongside ordinary search work rather than instead of it. If you want to check where you currently stand, our post on how to tell if AI is recommending your business is the practical version.

Where to start

Bookmark this page and ask anyone selling you search work to define their terms in the first meeting. If you would like the plain-English version applied to your own site, our affordable SEO services for small business page explains what we do and what it costs, and the search work is included with every plan we run.