The terms that actually matter.
39 atomic definitions of the paid media, SEO, AEO, CRO and analytics concepts we use every day. No fluff, no hedging, built to be the clearest answer on the internet.
Paid Media
Performance Max
Performance Max (PMax) is Google Ads' automated campaign type that uses Google's AI to serve ads across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discover, and Maps from a single campaign.
Smart Bidding
Smart Bidding is Google Ads' machine-learning bidding system that automatically sets per-auction bids to optimize for a chosen conversion goal.
Offline Conversions
Offline conversions are post-click events (calls, demos attended, deals closed) imported back into Google Ads from a CRM or call-tracking system.
Quality Score
Quality Score is Google Ads' 1-to-10 diagnostic rating per keyword based on three signals: expected click-through rate, ad relevance to the query, and landing page experience.
Customer Match
Customer Match is Google Ads' first-party-data targeting feature that lets advertisers upload hashed customer lists (emails, phone numbers, mailing addresses) to target, exclude, or model lookalikes of those users across Search, YouTube, Gmail, Display, and Shopping.
GCLID (Google Click Identifier)
GCLID is the unique tracking parameter Google Ads appends to ad click URLs (`?gclid=XYZ`) to identify each individual click.
Enhanced Conversions
Enhanced Conversions is Google Ads' privacy-preserving conversion-tracking enhancement that sends hashed first-party customer data (email, phone, name, address) alongside the standard conversion event.
Ad Rank
Ad Rank is the value Google Ads calculates for every auction to decide whether your ad shows and in what position.
Keyword Match Types
Match types control how closely a search query must align with your keyword before your ad is eligible to show.
Lookalike / Similar Audiences
A lookalike audience is a targeting segment built by an ad platform's machine learning to find new users who resemble an existing source audience (such as your customer list or website converters).
Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are terms you add to a campaign or ad group to prevent your ads from showing on searches that include them.
Competitor Conquesting
Competitor conquesting is bidding on a competitor's brand name as a Google Ads keyword so your ad shows when people search for them.
Impression Share
Impression share is the percentage of impressions your ads received out of the total they were eligible for.
Auction Insights
Auction Insights is a Google Ads report showing how your performance compares to other advertisers in the same auctions, across six metrics including impression share, overlap rate, position above rate, and outranking share.
Target CPA (tCPA)
Target CPA is a Smart Bidding strategy where you set the average cost you're willing to pay per conversion, and Google automatically sets bids in each auction to hit that target across the campaign.
Responsive Search Ads (RSA)
Responsive Search Ads are the standard Google Search ad format: you supply up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions, and Google mixes and matches them in real time to find the best-performing combinations for each query.
Dynamic Search Ads (DSA)
Dynamic Search Ads target searches based on the content of your website rather than a keyword list.
Remarketing (Retargeting)
Remarketing shows ads to people who have already interacted with your site, app, or videos, on Search, Display, YouTube, or Shopping.
Local Services Ads (LSA)
Local Services Ads are a pay-per-lead format that appears at the very top of local search results, above standard Google Ads, with a Google Guaranteed or Google Screened trust badge.
Google Guaranteed
Google Guaranteed is the verification badge (green checkmark) shown on Local Services Ads for home-service businesses that passed Google's license, insurance, and background checks.
Google Screened
Google Screened is the verification badge shown on Local Services Ads for licensed professionals — lawyers, financial advisors, and real estate agents.
Ad Assets (Ad Extensions)
Ad assets (formerly called ad extensions) are extra pieces of information attached to a search ad, sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, call buttons, location, price, and promotions.
SEO & AEO
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring content to be cited as a source in AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Google AI Overviews.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the academic term for optimizing content visibility within large language model generated responses, introduced in a 2024 Princeton-led research paper.
E-E-A-T
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness — Google's framework for evaluating content quality, codified in its Search Quality Rater Guidelines.
llms.txt
llms.txt is a proposed standard (analogous to robots.txt) for a markdown file at a website's root that gives large language models a structured summary of the site's content and key pages.
IndexNow
IndexNow is an open-source protocol that lets websites instantly notify search engines when content is added, updated, or deleted.
Schema Markup
Schema markup is structured data added to a webpage in JSON-LD, Microdata, or RDFa format that explicitly tells search engines and AI systems what the content is about.
Google Knowledge Graph
Google Knowledge Graph is Google's structured-data database of real-world entities — people, organizations, places, products — and the relationships between them.
Google Business Profile
Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is Google's free local-business listing system that powers the Google Maps panel, the local 3-pack on Search SERPs, and entity verification in the Knowledge Graph.
YMYL (Your Money or Your Life)
YMYL is Google's classification for content topics that could impact a user's future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety.
CRO
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are three Google-defined page-experience metrics that measure real-user loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the systematic practice of improving the percentage of website visitors who complete a desired action — submitting a form, booking a call, purchasing a product.
Analytics
ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
ROAS is revenue generated divided by advertising spend, usually expressed as a ratio or percentage.
Attribution Window
An attribution window (or conversion window) is the period after an ad interaction during which a resulting conversion is credited to that ad.
CPC (Cost Per Click)
CPC is the amount you pay each time someone clicks your ad.
CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)
CPA is the average amount you pay for one conversion: total cost divided by total conversions.
CTR (Click-Through Rate)
CTR is the percentage of people who clicked your ad after seeing it: clicks divided by impressions.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of clicks (or interactions) that result in a conversion: conversions divided by clicks.
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