Glossary

A search or assistant service that replies to a question with a written answer generated by a language model, usually listing the sources it drew on, instead of or above a list of links.

Analytics

A link to one of your pages listed as a source in an AI-generated answer. Tracked alongside brand mentions, citations show which of your pages the engines trust and how often you appear in answers to the questions that matter to you.

Analytics

An extra layer of information that stores how opaque each pixel is, from fully transparent to fully solid. It is what lets a cutout sit on any background. PNG and WebP support it; JPG does not, so transparent areas turn white or black when a cutout is saved as JPG.

Photo

A short video made from an audio clip: cover art or a still image, an animated waveform and captions. It lets you share a podcast moment on social feeds that only play video, where most people scroll with the sound off.

Audio

The address declared as the main version of a page, with a rel="canonical" link, when the same content can be reached at several addresses. Search engines then concentrate ranking signals on that one URL instead of splitting them.

Web

Visible flaws left by lossy compression such as JPG: blocky squares in flat areas, halos along edges and color banding in skies. Every new save adds a little more, which is why it is best to edit from the original file rather than a downloaded copy.

Photo

Three metrics defined by Google to measure the real-world experience of a page: loading (LCP), responsiveness (INP) and visual stability (CLS). A page passes when at least 75% of visits meet the “good” threshold for each of the three.

Web

A score for how much content moves unexpectedly while a page loads, such as text jumping down when an image or a banner appears above it. Good is 0.1 or less; over 0.25 is poor. Reserving space for images and embeds prevents most shifts.

Web

A grayscale map that says which pixels belong to the subject: white keeps, black removes, gray keeps partly, which is how fine hair stays natural. Editing the mask instead of the photo means any correction can be undone without losing quality.

Photo

High Efficiency Image Container, the default photo format on iPhones since 2017. It stores a photo in roughly half the space of a comparable JPG, but some older software cannot open it, which is why HEIC photos are often converted before sharing.

Photo

An attribute that tells search engines which language and regional versions of a page exist, so each searcher gets the right one. Every version must list all the others and itself, and an x-default entry can catch visitors in every other language.

Web

How quickly a page responds to clicks, taps and key presses, measured as the delay before the screen visibly updates. Good is 200 milliseconds or less; over 500 milliseconds is poor. It replaced First Input Delay as a Core Web Vital in March 2024.

Web

The time it takes for the largest image or block of text in the viewport to appear. Good is 2.5 seconds or less; over 4 seconds is poor. Heavy hero images, render-blocking scripts and slow servers are the usual causes.

Web

Loudness Units relative to Full Scale, the unit used to measure perceived loudness over a whole program. Podcasts commonly aim for about −16 LUFS in stereo, so an episode plays at a similar volume to the others in a listener’s queue.

Audio

Pixels per inch (ppi) measures how densely an image is printed; printers often call it dpi, for dots per inch. 300 ppi is the usual target for photo prints seen up close and 150 ppi for posters seen from a few steps away. Changing the value alone never adds a single pixel.

Photo

Recording the position of your pages for a set of keywords, day after day, in a given country, language and device. Positions are measured signed out from each market, so they do not depend on anyone’s location or search history.

Analytics

What a person searching actually wants: to learn something, reach a specific site, compare options before buying, or buy now. Pages rank best when they match the intent behind a query, not just its words.

Analytics

Search engine results page: everything shown after a search, from the classic list of links to ads, maps, product carousels, videos and AI-generated answers. Ranking positions are counted among the organic results.

Analytics

Working out who speaks when in a recording, so that each passage of a transcript is labeled with its speaker. It is most reliable when the number of speakers is known and when voices do not overlap.

Audio

SubRip Subtitle, the most widely supported subtitle file format. It is plain text: numbered subtitles, each with a start and end time written like 00:01:02,500 --> 00:01:05,000, followed by one or two lines of text.

Audio

Increasing the pixel dimensions of an image. Classic resizing stretches existing pixels and looks soft; AI upscaling predicts plausible detail from patterns learned on similar images, which looks sharper but can invent detail that was never there, so faces and text deserve a check.

Photo

One figure that sums up how visible a site is for its tracked keywords, weighting each position by the share of clicks it typically receives. It moves more steadily than individual rankings, which makes trends easier to read.

Analytics

Web Video Text Tracks, the subtitle format read natively by web video players. Close to SRT, it starts with a WEBVTT header, uses a dot instead of a comma before the milliseconds and supports positioning and basic styling.

Audio

The standard measure of transcription accuracy: the words substituted, deleted or inserted, divided by the number of words actually spoken. A 5% word error rate means about one mistake every 20 words, usually on names, numbers and crosstalk.

Audio