Glossary

Annotation. A note on a date, drawn on the charts: a Google update, a release, or something you recorded. See Annotations.

Average position. Where your page appeared in Google's results, averaged over every search it showed up in. Position 1 is the top. A lower number is better. We weight it by impressions, so busy searches count for more.

Brand search. A search that contains your brand name, such as "acme shoes". Your brand terms in Settings decide which searches count. See Breakdowns.

Business value. Your rating, from 1 to 5, of how much an action's page or query matters to your business. It changes the action's priority. See Reading an action.

Cannibalisation (competing pages). Two or more of your pages showing up for the same search, so they split Google's attention. See Reports.

Clicks. How many times someone clicked through from Google to your site.

Confidence. On an action, how much data backs the evidence, as a percentage. More impressions behind it means higher confidence. It is not the chance the change will work.

Content gap. A search you appear for, but too far down the results for anyone to click.

Coverage. How much of a site's total traffic the detailed page and query data accounts for. Google leaves some of it out. See Why the numbers differ from Search Console.

CTR (click-through rate). Clicks divided by impressions. 50 clicks from 1,000 impressions is a CTR of 5%.

Data through. The last complete day of data we have from Search Console, usually two days ago. Every period ends on this day.

Decay (traffic decline). A page that is losing the clicks it used to get. Needs 56 days of history.

Domain property. A Search Console property that covers a whole domain, every subdomain and both http and https. It looks like sc-domain:example.com.

Effort. On an action, a rough guide from 1 (quick) to 5 (a lot) to how much work the change takes.

Experiment. A change you record so we can compare the period after it with the same length of time before. See Experiments.

Impact range. On an action, our low and high estimate of the extra clicks you could gain over about a month.

Impressions. How many times your site appeared in Google's results, whether or not anyone clicked.

Page health. A score out of 100 for one of your busiest pages: how well it is doing in search overall.

Priority. The number the Action plan sorts by. Bigger gains, stronger evidence and less work push an action up, and your business value rating moves it up or down.

Query. A search someone typed into Google that your site appeared for.

Site. A Search Console property you have added to Copilot SEO. Search Console calls it a property.

Striking distance. A search where you rank just short of the top results: close enough that a small improvement can bring real clicks.

URL group. A saved set of pages, picked by rules such as "address contains /blog/". See URL groups.

URL-prefix property. A Search Console property that covers only addresses starting with an exact prefix, such as https://www.example.com/.