If you explain search performance to colleagues or clients, you need terms that make clear what was measured. Conventional search terms as used across this site. Where a term has a precise meaning that is commonly loosened, the entry gives the precise one.
Query and keyword
A query is what a person typed. A keyword is what you chose to track or target.
They are not the same thing and the difference is practical. People search in ways nobody would choose as a tracking target, including misspellings, questions and very long phrases. A tracked keyword is a sample of a broader set of real queries, which is why keyword rank tracking measures a proxy rather than complete visibility.
SERP
The search engine results page: everything returned for a query, not only the organic list.
A modern results page can contain organic results, ads, an AI Overview, related searches, people-also-ask questions, local results and more. A report describing "position 3" without stating what else was on the page describes a smaller thing than it appears to.
A single Google request in this product returns the organic results, the ads and the AI Overview together for that keyword.
Organic position
Where a page appears in the unpaid results for a query, at the time of the check.
Positions vary by location, device, language and personalization, so a position is always a position under conditions. Two tools reporting different numbers for the same keyword are usually both right about different conditions.
Impression
A record that a result was shown for a query.
Impressions come from a search engine's own reporting about your property, such as Search Console. A rank tracker cannot produce them, because it observes results rather than what was shown to real people. OppAlerts does not report impressions.
Click and click-through rate
A click is a visit that followed a result. Click-through rate is clicks divided by impressions for the same set of queries and the same period.
The denominator and the period have to be stated for a rate to mean anything. A rate over all queries and a rate over branded queries describe different things and the second is nearly always higher.
These also come from the engine's own reporting. OppAlerts does not report clicks or click-through rate, and no position it reports establishes traffic.
Indexation
Whether a search engine has stored a page and may return it.
Indexation is separate from ranking and from crawling. A page can be fetched and not indexed, or indexed and never returned for any query you care about.
Canonical URL
The address a search engine treats as the main one for a set of duplicate or near-duplicate pages.
The distinction that causes trouble: the canonical tag is a signal rather than an instruction. A search engine selects a canonical using several signals and may choose a different URL from the one declared. Checking which URL was selected is a different task from checking which one you declared.
Referring domain
A site with at least one link to yours, counted once regardless of how many links it carries.
Distinct from a backlink count, and usually the more meaningful of the two. Fifty links from one site and fifty links from fifty sites are different situations that produce the same backlink number.
AI Overview
A generated summary shown above conventional Google results, with links to sources.
It sits alongside the organic results for the same query, so a page can be cited in the overview while ranking poorly in the organic list, and vice versa. Those are two separate measurements of the same keyword and both are worth having.
AI Mode
A separate Google experience that answers conversationally and returns cited sources rather than a page of organic results.
Because there is no organic list, there is no organic position to report for it. Comparing an AI Mode result with a keyword ranking compares two different things.
Rank tracking
Checking recorded positions for a defined keyword set on a schedule.
Its value comes from consistency rather than from any single reading. Keep the keyword set, the location and the frequency stable, and changes over time mean something. Change any of them and the series restarts.
Share of voice
A brand's presence across a defined set of queries or prompts, relative to named competitors.
Interpret share of voice using its definition. Check which queries or prompts are included, which competitors are counted and what the figure measures. Presence, position-weighted presence and citations produce different results from the same data.
Site audit
A technical examination of a website: broken links, redirects, duplicate content, indexation problems, page speed, structured data errors.
OppAlerts does not include site audits. This is stated here because readers encountering the term on an SEO glossary reasonably assume the product performs one. Site auditing is a separate category of tool.
Use these definitions when writing a search report. Naming the measurement precisely helps the reader understand which business questions it can answer.
See how AEO, GEO and SEO relate, why visibility is not traffic, or whether OppAlerts includes site audits.