Words CitedSEO uses

What opportunity, card, keyword group, topic, pillar page, cited, search snippet and the app's other terms mean, in plain words.

Written By Damian

Last updated About 2 hours ago

An opportunity is a change CitedSEO found worth making to your site, shown as a card in Opportunities. A keyword group is a set of searches one page can cover, a topic is a subject your site covers, made of keyword groups, and a pillar page is a topic's main page. An AI answer cites you when it links to one of your pages. The rest of the words the app uses are below.

Your queue

Word	What it means
Opportunity	A change CitedSEO found worth making: a new article, an update to one of its articles, a new title and search snippet, or links.
Card	One opportunity, with what CitedSEO would change, why, and the numbers behind it.
Estimated gain	What a change aims for, such as clicks a month or AI assistants citing you, and how sure CitedSEO is. It's an estimate, not a promise.
Spotted	Found and ranked, with the numbers behind it, but not planned yet.
Needs your OK	Planned and waiting for you to approve it.
Scheduled	Approved, or covered by autopilot, with when it should go live.
Shipped	Live on your site, with a way to undo it.
Autopilot	Which kinds of change go live without waiting for your OK. Every site starts on Approve first.
Needs you	The list at the bottom of the sidebar of what only you can fix, such as a connection that signed CitedSEO out.

Kinds of opportunity

Kind	What it means
Content gap	People search for something you sell or know about, and you have no page for it yet.
Striking distance	One of CitedSEO's articles ranks just off page one of Google, 8th to 20th.
Content decay	One of CitedSEO's articles that used to do well is slowly losing clicks.
Low CTR	One of CitedSEO's articles shows up in Google, but fewer people click it than usual for its place.
Cannibalisation	Two or more of CitedSEO's articles compete for the same search.
Internal links	One of CitedSEO's articles that few pages link to, or a link in one to a page that has gone.
Citation gap	AI assistants answer a question one of CitedSEO's articles covers, but cite other sites.

Searches and pages

Word	What it means
Search	What people type into Google.
Keyword group	Searches Google answers with mostly the same results, so one page can rank for all of them. Each row on Keywords is one group, and CitedSEO writes one article for each.
Personal difficulty	How hard a search is for your site to rank for, from 0 to 100, in bands from Very easy to Very hard. It starts from the usual keyword difficulty and is raised when the sites on page one are stronger than yours, or when it's searched a lot. CitedSEO picks searches under 50 to write about itself; you can ask for any.
Topic	A subject your site covers, such as one product area. Each keyword group belongs to one topic.
Topic clusters	Your site grouped by topic: each topic's pillar page and the pages around it.
Pillar page	A topic's main page, for its broadest search, which the topic's other pages link to. Only a topic with four or more pages has one.
Search market	The country and language your searches and AI answers are checked in, set in Settings › Site details. It doesn't limit who reads your site.
Written or changed by us	A page where one of CitedSEO's articles is live. CitedSEO only ever changes these; the rest of your site is read, never edited.

Google

Word	What it means
Search Console	Google's own record of how your site does in search. CitedSEO reads it once you connect it.
Times you showed up	How often your pages appeared in Google's results, whether or not anyone clicked. Search Console calls these impressions.
Clicks	How often someone clicked through to your site from Google.
Click rate	Clicks as a share of the times you showed up, also called CTR.
Position	Where your page sits in Google's results for a search. Page one is the top 10.
Search snippet	The title and description Google shows for a page in its results. An article's page in Articles shows it under On Google. The Titles and descriptions switch in Settings › Autopilot decides whether a new one ships on its own.

AI assistants

Word	What it means
AI visibility	How often ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI cite or name you when asked the questions CitedSEO tracks for your site.
Cited	An answer links to one of your pages as a source. This is what can send you visitors.
Named	An answer mentions your site by name, with or without a link. A mention builds awareness, but sends no one to your site on its own.
Others cited	The answers to a question cite other sites, not yours.
Who AI recommends	Who else the answers name and link to, with your competitors marked.

Publishing

Word	What it means
Publish time	When each day's change goes live, set in Settings › Site details.
Feed	Where every article CitedSEO publishes goes live, for your site's own code to show. A connected WordPress gets each one as a post too.
Byline	Who an article is by: one of your authors, or your site.

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