Every word that carries weight in Metric Vault, defined once. Three vocabularies overlap here: classic SEO terms, the newer language of AI visibility, and the words this product uses for its own parts. They are interleaved alphabetically rather than separated, because when you are reading a result you do not know which family a word belongs to.
Definitions are written for the meaning the word has in this product. Where an industry term is used more loosely elsewhere, the definition says what we measure. Where a term has a full article behind it, the entry links to it.
If you are new and want the shortest possible orientation, read Key concepts and vocabulary first: it covers the eight terms that everything else assumes. This page is for looking one word up.
The domain, URL or keyword the app carries between tools, so moving from one screen to another keeps your subject.
AdClarity
The display and video advertising tab on Advertising Intelligence. It reports the ad formats and placements a domain runs. 3 credits.
Advanced Technical Checks
A Site Health screen that runs four free tools against one URL in a single click: hreflang, mixed content, redirect chain and tech stack. Free, because all four are free.
AI citation
A source an AI engine names or links when it answers a question. Being cited is the AI-era equivalent of ranking.
AI crawler
A bot run by an AI company that fetches pages so a model can read or cite them. The crawlers our tools check for are GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-Web, anthropic-ai, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, CCBot and Applebot-Extended.
AI engine
One of the assistants we query live: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude, plus Google's AI Overviews. Which of them a run reaches depends on which providers are configured. See AI models used across the platform.
AI Overview
The AI-written answer block Google places above the classic list of results.
AI visibility
How often, and how favourably, an AI assistant mentions your brand when asked a question in your category. Measured by asking real engines real questions, not by inference.
AI visibility score
The share of chances where your brand appeared, as a percentage. A run of ten prompts across four engines is forty chances; appearing in ten of them scores 25.
Allowance
See Quota.
Analyst AI
The conversational assistant that answers questions about your own results. 1 credit per message. See Analyst AI.
Anchor text
The visible, clickable words of a link. A healthy inbound profile has varied anchors rather than the same commercial phrase repeated.
Answer engine
A system that answers a question directly instead of returning a list of links. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews are answer engines.
API key
A credential beginning mv_live_ used to call the public API. Enterprise only, five active keys per account. See API keys.
Authority Score
A 0 to 100 estimate of a domain's overall strength, based mostly on its link profile. Comparative, not absolute: use it to rank domains against each other.
Auto-Execute
A four-stage chain that turns a topic into a finished, optimized article: SEO Brief, Article Outline, Full Article Writer, Content Optimizer. 4 credits.
The small marker beside a tool's name in the tool list: LIVE, NEW, BETA, WORKFLOW or DEPRECATED. See Tool status badges.
Blog Studio
The built-in publishing system: sites, posts, media, subscribers and newsletters.
Bulk Analysis
Runs one chosen tool across a pasted list of domains, one after another. Ten domains per run, each charged at that tool's full price. See Bulk Analysis.
How old a cached result is, shown on the result so you know whether you are looking at today's data or last week's.
Cache hit
A result served from stored data instead of a fresh call to our data provider. It is charged at the tool's normal price; the cache saves our provider bill, not your credits. See Result caching and freshness.
Cadence
How often a scheduled report runs: daily, weekly or monthly.
Canonical URL
The tag on a page declaring which URL is the preferred version, so duplicates do not compete with each other.
Chrome extension
The browser extension that shows a quick view of any site you are on. 1 credit per quick view. See The Chrome extension.
Client workspace
An agency arrangement where one client's data is kept separate from another's. See Client workspaces.
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)
A Core Web Vital measuring how much a page's content jumps around while it loads. Lower is better.
The states a blog post moves through: draft, pending review, scheduled, published.
Engine
See AI engine.
ETV (estimated traffic value)
What the organic traffic a page or domain earns would have cost to buy as advertising. A way to compare pages by commercial worth rather than by visits.
Explainer
The long illustrated article below each tool, teaching the idea the tool measures. See In-app tool explainers.
Export
A download of a result as PDF, Excel, CSV or JSON. Free, and it never re-runs the tool. See Exporting results.
The business listing that appears in Google Maps and the local pack. Audited by GBP Audit. See GBP Audit.
GEO (generative engine optimization)
Optimizing to be read, understood and cited by AI answers, rather than only to rank in a list of links.
Growth Actions
A ranked queue of what to do next, built by reading your saved AI-visibility results. 3 credits, and it charges nothing when it has no results to read.
GSC (Google Search Console)
Google's free reporting on how your own site performs in search. Connecting it replaces estimates with measurements. See Google Search Console.
A result that says nothing was measured instead of showing a plausible invented figure. Thirty tools are built to do this rather than let a model fill the gap.
Hreflang
Tags declaring which language and region version of a page to serve to which audience.
HSTS
A response header telling browsers to reach a site only over HTTPS. Checked by Security Headers.
Hub page
A page that links out to a cluster of related pages, concentrating internal link signals. Identified by the Internal Linking Engine.
Keywords a competitor ranks for and you do not. The fastest route to a content plan grounded in evidence. See Gap Finder.
Keyword Vault
Your saved keyword list, reusable across tools and exportable. See Keyword Vault.
Kill switch
An operator control that takes one tool out of service, usually during an incident. You see This tool is temporarily unavailable. Please try again shortly.
A Core Web Vital: how long the main content of a page takes to appear.
Library
The workspace holding Saved work, your results grouped by tool, and Activity, a timeline of everything done. See Saved Work.
Light tool
A tool costing 1 credit. On a paid plan a light tool is never blocked by the monthly allowance, though its credits still count toward the recorded total.
Lighthouse
Google's page-audit engine, which produces the performance, accessibility, SEO and best-practices scores in PageSpeed & Vitals.
llms.txt
A proposed file at a site's root that summarizes the site for AI systems, in the way robots.txt describes crawling rules. Generated by the llms.txt Builder. See llms.txt generator.
Long-tail keyword
A longer, more specific phrase with lower volume and usually lower difficulty and higher intent.
The summary tag a search engine may show beneath your title. It does not affect ranking directly; it affects whether anyone clicks.
Microdata
An older way of writing structured data, inline in HTML attributes. Detected alongside JSON-LD by the Schema Tool.
Mixed content
Insecure http: resources loaded by a secure https: page. Active mixed content is blocked by browsers; passive is merely reported.
Monthly reset
00:00 UTC on the first day of the calendar month, when your credit counter returns to zero. It is not your billing anniversary, and unused credits do not carry over.
The recurring themes that shape how AI engines describe your brand. Knowing them tells you what to reinforce and what to correct.
Nofollow
A link marked so search engines do not pass ranking signals through it.
Notification
An in-app alert in the bell panel, optionally also sent by email. Alerts come from Competitor Monitor, Rank Alerts and Scheduled Reports. See Notifications and alerts hub.
The expandable box of related questions in Google's results. A reliable source of real question phrasing.
PageSpeed Insights
Google's page-performance service, behind PageSpeed & Vitals. It is rate limited, which is why a stored report is sometimes served instead.
Plan
Your subscription tier. It sets your monthly credits, your seats and which gated features are unlocked. See Plans and pricing.
Position
Where a page ranks for a keyword on a results page.
Premium report
A run costing 3 credits or more. These are the runs the monthly allowance actually limits.
Probe
The Dashboard's quick Domain Overview button. It charges the full 6 credits; the neighbouring See example path charges nothing.
Prompt
A question put to an AI engine. Metric Vault generates prompts from your real ranking keywords and news coverage so they resemble what people actually ask.
Prompt tracking
Asking the same prompts repeatedly over time and recording how your brand fares, so you can see movement rather than a single snapshot. See AI prompt tracking.
The domain, URL, keyword or topic you ran a tool against.
TBT (Total Blocking Time)
How long a page's main thread was blocked during load. A PageSpeed diagnostic that usually explains a poor interaction score.
Thin content
A page with too little substance to satisfy the query it targets.
TLD
The last part of a domain name, such as .com or .de. Backlink Profile groups referring domains by TLD.
Tool
One measurement or one piece of generated work. There are roughly seventy, grouped into twelve sections.
Tool id
The identifier a tool is known by in the API, in JSON exports and in your usage breakdown, for example domain_overview. Listed for every tool in Credit cost table.
Toxic link
An inbound link from a source likely to harm rather than help.
Trust score
An estimate of how trustworthy a domain's link profile looks, read alongside spam score rather than on its own.
The running total of credits charged this calendar month, shown in the top bar as <used> / <quota> reports. It includes light-tool runs, which is why it can read higher than your quota while light tools keep working. See Tracking your usage.
The strip above a result naming where its numbers came from: measured search data, live AI engines, or measured data with an AI summary on top.
View
One screen in the app. Each has its own address, so a tool page can be bookmarked or sent to a colleague.
Visibility
In Rank Tracker, a single figure summarizing how visible a domain is across the keywords it ranks for, so you can watch one number instead of hundreds.
The internal name for Competitor Monitor, the automation that re-fetches a URL on a schedule and records what changed. See Competitor monitor.
White-label
A report carrying your own logo, colors and footer instead of ours. Requires Pro or above. See White-label reports.
Win rate
In Prompt Tracking, the share of tracked prompts where your brand appears in the answer.
Workflow
A bundle of tools that runs in one click against one input and returns a consolidated report. Six of them live in the Get Started section, and each button states the combined credit cost.
Workspace
Everything one account owns, and the boundary teammates are invited into. See Workspaces explained.
A search answered on the results page itself, so no link is clicked. AI Overviews and featured snippets are the main causes, and the reason being cited now matters as much as being ranked.