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The plain-language glossary
Twenty terms you will meet in your reports, explained the way a colleague would over coffee. No jargon defining jargon.
Health score
A 0 to 100 number computed from weighted issues per crawled page. It cannot be flattered by crawling fewer pages, and its job is to move over time, not to look good on day one.
Crawl
One automated pass through your site, following links the way a search engine does and recording what it finds. Everything in a report comes from a specific crawl, so numbers always have a date.
Indexable page
A page search engines are allowed to show: it returns 200, is not blocked by robots.txt, carries no noindex, and does not point its canonical elsewhere. Only indexable pages can earn traffic.
Canonical
A tag that says "this URL is the real version of this content." Wrong canonicals quietly hand your rankings to the wrong page, which is why the audit checks the tag, its target, and whether the target actually works.
Orphan page
An indexable page no other page links to. It exists, but your own site never mentions it, so link equity never reaches it and discovery depends on luck.
Link equity
The authority that flows through internal links. Pages with many links from strong pages rank easier. Swiss Knife SEO computes it position-weighted: a link in body copy carries more meaning than one in a footer.
Internal PageRank
The score that results from simulating how equity flows through your internal links. It ranks your own pages by strength, which tells you exactly which pages should link to the ones that need help.
Anchor text
The clickable words of a link. Anchors tell engines what the target page is about, and when many pages use the same anchor for different targets, they compete with each other.
Cannibalization
Two or more of your pages competing for the same query or anchor. Neither wins cleanly. The fix is usually consolidation: one page takes the topic, the others point to it.
SERP
The search engine results page. Modern SERPs contain far more than ten blue links, which is why position tracking here records the features around your ranking too.
AI Overview
Google's AI-written answer that appears above the results for many queries. It cites sources, and being one of them is the new position zero.
Citation
A source link inside an AI assistant's answer. When ChatGPT or Perplexity answers a buyer's question, the cited domains get the attention. AI visibility tracking measures whether yours is among them.
llms.txt
A small file that lists your most important pages for AI assistants, the way a sitemap does for search crawlers. Swiss Knife SEO generates one ranked by your internal link equity.
agents.json
A manifest describing your site to AI agents: what it is, what it offers, how to interact. Early-days, cheap to publish, and the validator keeps yours structurally correct.
Robots.txt
The file that tells crawlers where they may and may not go. One wrong line can hide your whole site from Google or block the AI crawlers you want citing you, which is why changes to it are monitored daily.
Core Web Vitals
Google's page-experience trio: LCP, how fast the main content paints; CLS, how much the layout jumps around; INP, how fast the page responds to interaction. Measured here with both lab tests and real-user field data.
Nofollow
A link attribute that asks engines not to pass authority through the link. A backlink turning nofollow keeps sending visitors but stops sending equity, which is why the monitor flags the change.
Structured data
Machine-readable markup, usually JSON-LD, that tells engines exactly what a page contains: a product, an article, a business, an event. Correct markup unlocks richer results; broken markup unlocks nothing.
Content decay
The slow loss of clicks on a page that used to earn them, visible across consecutive 28-day windows long before rankings collapse. Caught early, a refresh usually reverses it.
Crawl budget
The attention search engines are willing to spend on your site. Wasting it on parameter duplicates and redirect chains means your real pages get crawled less often. The log analyzer and faceted-navigation report show where yours goes.
Now see the terms on your own site
Definitions stick when they describe your pages. Run a free audit and watch the vocabulary turn into a fix list.