What Is SEO: Google's Own Definition

On September 14, I searched Google in Brazil, where we are based, for “o que é seo.” That is Portuguese for “what is SEO.” Right below the first result sat the box of questions other people also ask. One of them wanted to know the difference between CEO and SEO. ¹

The mix-up is easy to understand. Say the two acronyms out loud and they sound almost the same. And every site explains SEO its own way.

On that results page, the most common line said SEO is a set of techniques to improve a site’s ranking. ¹ The line is not wrong. It just leaves out who decides the ranking, and what that someone wrote on the subject.

The first organic result was Google’s own, its starter guide to SEO. Among the other pages I read in the top ten, none cites Google’s definition. ¹

Google did write its own. More than one, in fact, in different words. I will start with two of them. After that come what the term covers today, where it came from, and what Google says it does not do.

The definition from the one who decides the ranking

Google’s documentation for site owners has a section that asks this piece’s question. The answer fits in one sentence: “Search engine optimization is the process of making your site better for search engines.” ²

The next sentence explains the question box from the start. SEO is also the job title of the person who does this work. Google’s example is a company that just hired a new SEO. ² The CEO runs the company. The SEO looks after how it shows up in search.

The second definition is in the SEO Starter Guide. ³ It opens with an observation few people make. When you built your site, you had your visitors in mind. One of those visitors is a search engine. ³

Picture a store sign on a busy avenue. It has two readers. The driver goes by fast and needs to grasp what the store sells. The pedestrian has stopped on the sidewalk and needs to decide whether to walk in.

The guide describes SEO with those two readers. The goal is to help search engines understand your content. And to help people find your site and decide whether to visit it from a search engine. ³

The two definitions complement each other. The first says what changes, which is the site. The second says for whom it changes: the machine that reads and the person who chooses.

Where the acronym came from, and why nobody knows for sure

I looked for the document that proves who coined the term. I did not find it. What exists are recollections, some of them well recorded, and one claim.

The oldest dated recollection comes from Danny Sullivan, who ran Search Engine Watch. On June 14, 2004, he answered a forum question about who invented the term. ⁵

Sullivan went through his own archives. The first time he found the exact phrase in a newsgroup was July 1997. It came from a company pitching the service. ⁵ He closed his search without a definitive first reference. In his view, the term came into use around early to mid-1997. ⁵

The claim belongs to Bob Heyman. In a 2008 article on Search Engine Land, he wrote that he coined the term in 1995, with his partner Leland Harden. ⁶ The proof he offers is a story told in his own 1997 book. ⁶

It is a good story. Summer of 1995, three in the morning, the phone rings. It is the manager of the band Jefferson Starship, furious. The band’s site showed up several screens down in a search for its name. ⁶

To fix it, the team repeated the band’s name on the page, in tiny black print on a black background. According to Heyman, the site jumped to first place. ⁶

Hold on to that image. Today, hiding text from visitors to manipulate search engines is in Google’s spam policies. The first example on the list is white text on a white background. ⁷

In 2025, Rob Garner interviewed the pioneers for the same Search Engine Land. He writes that five people reached the idea of optimization at about the same time, without knowing one another. ⁸ By his account, Bruce Clay invented the term. John Audette and the pair of Heyman and Harden also get credit. ⁸

Some of the pages that rank for this search in Brazil say the term was first cited in 1997, in Heyman’s book. ¹ That is the version of one of the candidates. The dates meet between 1995 and 1997. The author remains an open question.

When someone tells you who invented SEO, ask which 1997 document shows it.

What the term covers today

Google’s definition fits in one sentence. The work takes up much more room. Today it splits into fronts, and each one has its own section on this site. Here is a short passage for each front, with its front door.

Crawling and indexing

Google Search works in three stages: crawling, indexing, and serving results. And not every page makes it through all of them. ⁹ Before it can compete for a position, a page has to be found, read, and stored in the index.

Technical

Google publishes the minimum a page needs in order to be indexed. Googlebot must not be blocked. The page has to return a 200 status code and have indexable content. ¹⁰ Meeting all three still does not guarantee indexing. ¹⁰ This front and the previous one live in our technical SEO section.

Content and intent

In the Starter Guide, one sentence weighs more than the others. Content that people find compelling and useful will likely shape your presence more than any other tip in the guide. ³ Answering the question the person asked is the heart of our semantic SEO section, where this page lives.

Local

For a business with an address, Google names three factors: relevance, distance, and prominence. Prominence, in Google’s words, means how well-known a business is. ¹¹ The same help page warns that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. ¹¹ The work on the map is in our local SEO section.

Entity

Search for the name of a city, a singer, or a big company. Often a box appears next to the results, with a photo and some facts. Google explains that the box shows up when the search is for something in its catalog, Google’s Knowledge Graph. ¹²

People, places, organizations, and things go into that catalog. ¹² Each one has its own name and its own facts. This is called an entity. Getting your company to exist there is the work of our Entity SEO section.

AI

On the search for “o que é seo,” the top of the page was a summary written by AI, above the first link. ¹ Google calls these features AI Overviews and AI Mode. For them, the documentation says, SEO best practices remain relevant. ¹³ It adds that no extra requirements or special optimizations are needed to appear in them. ¹³ How the machine picks whom to cite is in our SEO for AI section.

What Google says SEO does not do

The first line is on Google’s page about hiring an SEO: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.” ⁴

In the Starter Guide, you find the second. There is no guarantee that any given site will be added to Google’s index. And there are no secrets that will rank a site first on their own. The guide even adds, in parentheses, “sorry!” ³

The third calls for an image. Picture a magazine. It has articles and it has ads. Ads come with a rate card. In a serious magazine, articles are not for sale.

Google treats search the same way. Advertising with Google has no effect on a site’s presence in the results. And Google never accepts money to include or rank sites there. ⁴ The article, in search, is what Google calls organic search. ⁴ A link that shows up there without anyone paying for it is called an organic result. That is where SEO does its work.

Those lines take apart the most common promises in the industry. The full list, with Google’s official line next to each promise, is in Does SEO really work, or is it a scam?.

The question you ask from now on

From now on, when someone says they do SEO, you have a question to hand back. Which front?

Take a sheet of paper and write down the six fronts in this piece, one per line. Next to each one, note who handles it at your company today. It can be the agency, the site’s developer, you, or nobody.

The line that says “nobody” is the door to start from. Each front above links to its own section. Make the sheet today, before you open the next SEO proposal.

Frequently asked questions

Does SEO cost money?

Showing up in organic results costs nothing, and Google says so on two pages. ⁴ ¹⁰ It also never accepts money to include or rank sites. ⁴ What can cost money is the work, when you hire someone. For a small local business, Google says you can probably do much of the work yourself. ⁴

What is the difference between SEO and CEO?

CEO stands for chief executive officer, the top executive of a company. SEO stands for search engine optimization. In Google’s documentation, SEO is also the job title of the person who does that work. ²

Is SEO only for Google?

No. Google’s guide says good practices make it easier for search engines to crawl, index, and understand your content. And it adds, in parentheses: not just Google. ³ In the AI features of Google Search, the same practices remain relevant. ¹³

How long does SEO take to show results?

The Starter Guide says some changes take effect in a few hours, and others can take several months. It recommends waiting a few weeks before judging the effect. Not every change makes a noticeable impact. ³

Notes and sources

Reading of the Google results page in Brazil for “o que é seo” (what is SEO), done by the author on September 14, 2026, in his own browser tab, signed in, with the parameters hl=pt-BR, gl=br, and pws=0 (personalization off). At the top, an AI Overview, labeled “Visão geral criada por IA” in Portuguese, defined SEO as a set of techniques and strategies to improve ranking. In first organic position, Google’s SEO guide in Portuguese. In the “As pessoas também perguntam” (People also ask) box, among four questions: “Qual é a diferença entre CEO e SEO?” (What is the difference between CEO and SEO?), “O SEO é pago?” (Does SEO cost money?), and “Qual é o salário de um SEO?” (What does an SEO earn?). The definition as a set of techniques or strategies appears in six of the top ten organic results (RD Station, Orgânica Digital, Conversion, Salesforce, CORE-GO, going by the snippet shown in search, and GoDaddy); four of them mention ranking. The mention of 1997 and the book Net Results appears in RD Station, “SEO: o que é e TUDO sobre Search Engine Optimization” (SEO: what it is and EVERYTHING about Search Engine Optimization), https://www.rdstation.com/blog/marketing/o-que-e-seo/, and in GoDaddy, “O que é SEO? Para que serve e quais as melhores técnicas?” (What is SEO? What is it for, and what are the best techniques?), https://www.godaddy.com/resources/br/artigos/o-que-e-seo. Accessed September 14, 2026.
Google Search Central, “Documentation to Improve SEO,” section “What is SEO?”, https://developers.google.com/search/docs, page last updated February 4, 2025, and the official Portuguese version, “Documentação para melhorar a SEO,” section “O que é SEO?”, https://developers.google.com/search/docs?hl=pt-br, page last updated February 7, 2025. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passages: “Search engine optimization is the process of making your site better for search engines” and “It’s also the job title of a person who does this for a living: We just hired a new SEO to improve our presence on the web”. The sentence is on the documentation’s entry page; the Starter Guide (note 3) carries another definition. The opening paragraph of the same entry page carries a third, shorter line: “Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of increasing the visibility of website pages on search engines in order to attract more relevant traffic”.
Google Search Central, “Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide,” https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide, page last updated December 10, 2025, and the Portuguese version, “Guia de otimização de mecanismos de pesquisa (SEO) para iniciantes,” https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide?hl=pt-br, page last updated December 18, 2025. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passages: “One of those users is a search engine, which helps people discover your content”; the definition, which in the original sets off the expanded name between two dashes, left out here under the house rule: SEO “is about helping search engines understand your content, and helping users find your site and make a decision about whether they should visit your site through a search engine”; “there’s no guarantee that any particular site will be added to Google’s index”; “There are no secrets here that’ll automatically rank your site first in Google (sorry!)”; “make it easier for search engines (not just Google) to crawl, index, and understand your content”; “Creating content that people find compelling and useful will likely influence your website’s presence in search results more than any of the other suggestions in this guide”; and “Some changes might take effect in a few hours, others could take several months. In general, you likely want to wait a few weeks to assess whether your work had beneficial effects in Google Search results. Keep in mind that not all changes you make to your website will result in noticeable impact in search results”. In the Portuguese version, the definition says SEO “tem como objetivo ajudar os mecanismos de pesquisa a entender seu conteúdo e ajudar os usuários a encontrar seu site e decidir se eles devem ou não acessá-lo usando um mecanismo de pesquisa”.
Google Search Central, “Do you need an SEO?”, https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/do-i-need-seo, page last updated June 5, 2026, and the official Portuguese version, “Você precisa de SEO?”, https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/do-i-need-seo?hl=pt-br, page last updated June 10, 2026. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passages: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google”; “Advertising with Google won’t have any effect on your site’s presence in our search results. Google never accepts money to include or rank sites in our search results, and it costs nothing to appear in our organic search results”; “Google’s non-advertising search results (often called ‘organic search’)”; and “If you run a small local business, you can probably do much of the work yourself”. In the Portuguese version: “Ninguém pode garantir a classificação em primeiro lugar no Google” and “Não há custos para aparecer nos nossos resultados da pesquisa orgânica”.
Danny Sullivan, reply in the thread “Who Invented the Term ‘Search Engine Optimization’?”, Search Engine Watch forum, June 14, 2004, Internet Archive copy of April 23, 2010, http://web.archive.org/web/20100423051708/http://forums.searchenginewatch.com:80/showpost.php?p=2119. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passages: “July 1997: First reference I can find in newsgroups to the phrase ‘search engine optimization,’ from a company pitching these services” and “still no definitive first reference, but I think it’s fair to say that it seemed to come into play around early to mid-1997”. The original forum is no longer online; the archived copy is the source.
Bob Heyman, “Who Coined The Term SEO?”, Search Engine Land, October 2, 2008, https://searchengineland.com/who-coined-the-term-seo-14916. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passages: “As the person (along with my partner Leland Harden), who actually did coin the term Search Engine Optimization back in 1995”; the story, quoted from the book Net Results (1997), by Heyman, Harden, and Rick Bruner: “the summer of 1995, 3:00 a.m.”, the band’s site that “appeared several screens down in a search of ‘Jefferson Starship’”, and the fix, in which “the words Jefferson Starship recur on the page in tiny black print against a black background”, with the page rising to first place. It is the claimant’s own account.
Google Search Central, “Spam policies for Google web search,” section “Hidden text and link abuse,” https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies, page last updated August 28, 2026. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passages: “Hidden text or link abuse is the practice of placing content on a page in a way solely to manipulate search engines and not to be easily viewable by human visitors”; the first example on the list is “Using white text on a white background”.
Rob Garner, “The origins of SEO and what they mean for GEO and AIO,” Search Engine Land, September 24, 2025, https://searchengineland.com/origins-seo-geo-aio-462480. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passages: “five people came to the ‘optimization’ realization at the same time, though each was unknown to the others”, which he places between 1995 and 1997; “Bruce Clay invented the term”; and “John Audette and Bob Heyman (and his business partner Leland Harden) are also credited with coining the term”. The author credits Danny Sullivan with popularizing the term.
Google Search Central, “In-depth guide to how Google Search works,” https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/how-search-works, page last updated December 18, 2025. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passage: “Google Search works in three stages, and not all pages make it through each stage”, followed by Crawling, Indexing, and Serving search results.
Google Search Central, “Google Search technical requirements,” https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/technical, page last updated December 18, 2025. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passages: “It costs nothing to get your page in search results, no matter what anyone tries to tell you”; the three minimum requirements, “Googlebot isn’t blocked”, “The page works, meaning that Google receives an HTTP 200 (success) status code”, and “The page has indexable content”; and “indexing isn’t guaranteed”.
Google Business Profile Help, “Tips to improve your local ranking on Google,” https://support.google.com/business/answer/7091?hl=en. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passages: “There’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google”; the sections Relevance, Distance, and Prominence; and “Prominence means how well-known a business is”. The summary line on the same page speaks of “relevance, distance, and popularity”, and the section is still named Prominence. The Portuguese version is labeled as an AI translation, which is why the Portuguese edition of this piece also quotes the English.
Knowledge Panel Help, “About knowledge panels,” https://support.google.com/knowledgepanel/answer/9163198?hl=en. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passages: “Knowledge panels are information boxes that appear on Google when you search for entities (people, places, organizations, things) that are in the Knowledge Graph” and “Knowledge panels are automatically generated, and information that appears in a knowledge panel comes from various sources across the web”.
Google Search Central, “AI features and your website,” https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features, page last updated December 10, 2025, and the Portuguese version, “Recursos de IA e seu site,” https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features?hl=pt-br, page last updated December 31, 2025. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passage: “The best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI features in Google Search (such as AI Overviews and AI Mode). There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary”. In the Portuguese version, the features are called “Visões gerais criadas por IA” and “Modo IA”.

What Is SEO: Google's Own Definition and What the Term Covers Today