Reference

Traffic intelligence glossary

The vocabulary of GA4, Search Console, and AI-referral analytics — defined in plain English, with the practical “so what” for each. If a SignalGuide briefing uses a term you don't recognize, it's here.

Traffic & engagement

Session

A single visit to your site: one user, one continuous span of activity. GA4 starts a new session after 30 minutes of inactivity or when the traffic source changes. Sessions are the denominator for most rate metrics — bounce rate, conversion rate, and pages per session all divide by it.

Users (and new users)

Distinct people (really, distinct browsers/devices) who visited in a period. New users are first-time visitors; returning users are the rest. A spike in new users with flat returning users usually means a discovery event — a launch, a backlink, or an AI engine surfacing you.

Page view (views)

One load (or reload) of a page. One session can generate many views. Comparing views to sessions tells you depth: ~1 view per session means people land and leave; several views per session means they explore.

Bounce rate

The share of sessions that ended without a second interaction. In GA4 this is the inverse of engagement rate: a session is “engaged” if it lasts 10+ seconds, fires a conversion, or has 2+ page views. A high bounce rate on a conversion page is a red flag; on a quick-answer blog post it can be normal.

Engagement rate

The percentage of sessions GA4 classifies as engaged. It replaced the old Universal Analytics bounce-rate definition. Read it as the opposite of bounce rate — higher is better.

Entry page (landing page)

The first page of a session — where the visit started. Entry pages are the ones search engines and AI engines actually send people to, so they matter more for acquisition than pages buried deeper in the funnel.

Channels & sources

Channel

The grouped category of where a session came from: Organic Search, Direct, Referral, Paid Search, Social, Email, and so on. Channels are how you answer “is my traffic from Google, from links, or from people typing the URL?”

Organic search

Unpaid traffic from search engines — the clicks you earn from ranking, not from ads. This is the channel Search Console reports on.

Referral

Traffic that arrived via a link on another site. AI engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity currently show up inside this channel until you isolate them — which is the whole point of AI referral tracking.

Direct

Sessions with no detectable source — typed URLs, bookmarks, and anything that stripped the referrer (apps, some HTTPS-to-HTTP hops). A large Direct bucket often hides untagged campaigns and dark-social sharing.

UTM parameters

Tags appended to a URL (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign) that tell analytics exactly which campaign sent a click. Without them, paid and social traffic frequently misattributes to Direct or Referral.

Search Console & SEO

Impression

One appearance of your page in search results for a query — whether or not it was clicked or even scrolled into view. Impressions measure visibility; clicks measure pull.

Click (organic click)

A search result your page actually earned a tap on. Search Console's click counts are the ground truth for organic-search demand and are one of SignalGuide's default goals.

CTR (click-through rate)

Clicks ÷ impressions, as a percentage. A page with high impressions and low CTR is a CTR hole — you're visible but the title/description isn't earning the click. Often the cheapest SEO win there is.

Average position

The mean ranking of your page across the queries it appeared for in Search Console. Lower is better (position 1 is the top result). Moving from 4.2 to 3.1 is meaningful; below ~3 the click curve steepens fast.

Striking distance

Queries where you rank roughly positions 5–15 — close enough that a focused content or linking push can move you onto page one. These are SignalGuide's highest-ROI search opportunities because the impressions already exist.

Indexation

Whether Google has actually stored your page and will show it in results. A page can be crawled but not indexed. Two states to watch: “Discovered — currently not indexed” (Google knows it exists but hasn't prioritized it — usually a sign of weak internal linking or thin content) and “Crawled — currently not indexed.” An unindexed conversion page earns zero organic traffic, so SignalGuide flags it as a P0.

Crawl

The process of a search engine's bot fetching your pages. You guide it with a robots.txt file (what not to fetch) and an XML sitemap (the canonical list of pages worth indexing).

Canonical URL

The version of a page you tell search engines to treat as the original when several URLs show near-identical content. A wrong canonical can quietly deindex the page you actually wanted ranked.

Internal link

A link from one page on your site to another. Search engines read internal links as votes about which pages matter; pages that no other page links to tend to languish in “discovered, not indexed.” A dense, descriptive footer and in-content links are the standard fix.

AI & referral traffic

AI referral traffic

Visits sent by AI assistants — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot — when they cite or link your site in an answer. It's the fastest-growing acquisition channel and the one legacy tools don't isolate. See the field guide for how SignalGuide detects it.

AEO (answer engine optimization)

Optimizing content to be quoted by AI answer engines rather than just ranked by search engines. The tactics overlap with SEO (clear structure, factual density, authority) but the goal is being cited, not just listed.

Referrer

The URL the browser reports as the source of a click (e.g. chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai). Matching referrers against a list of AI hostnames is how AI sessions get attributed to the right engine instead of a generic Referral bucket.

SignalGuide concepts

Conversion page

A URL you've told SignalGuide represents a business outcome — a signup, a pricing view, a demo request. Analysis weights these heavily, so a problem on a conversion page outranks the same problem anywhere else. Configure them in Conversion pages.

Content cluster

A named group of pages that share a topic or funnel stage (e.g. “Healthcare,” “Docs,” “Pricing”). Clusters let you track cohort-level trends instead of chasing individual URLs. Set them up under Content clusters.

Vanity filter

A pattern that marks certain pages as noise — high-traffic content that doesn't drive the business (think “what is X” blog posts). Filtered pages stay in your data but stop triggering red flags, so reports focus on pages that matter.

Snapshot

A point-in-time pull of your GA4 + Search Console data for a period, plus the analysis derived from it. SignalGuide compares the latest snapshot against the previous one to compute deltas and detect anomalies.

Finding (red flag)

A specific problem the analysis surfaced — a bounce spike, a deindexed page, a traffic drop — scored P0 / P1 / P2 by how much it threatens what you said matters. P0 is “fix this before anything else.”

Action

A persistent, trackable item in your queue — a red-flag fix, a search opportunity, or a growth idea. Actions move through open → in_progress → done (or dismissed) so nothing gets lost between briefings.

Low-data mode

How SignalGuide behaves when traffic is too sparse for statistical noise to mean much. It leans on foundational fixes (indexation, internal linking, configuration) and treats single-digit counts as signal rather than trend.

Priority scoring (P0 / P1 / P2)

The ranking SignalGuide assigns every finding and opportunity. It blends severity, proximity to a conversion page, and your stated goals, so the top of the list is the thing most worth your next hour.