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This glossary collects the terms, product names, and metrics you’ll encounter across the Conductor platform. Terms are grouped by product area; many appear in more than one place, so use your browser’s find (⌘/Ctrl + F) to jump to a specific term.

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Products & platform

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Conductor AI

Conductor AI is the next generation of Conductor’s platform. Conductor AI includes all of our new capabilities designed to help brands in AI LLM search. Access to Conductor AI requires organizations to be on our new subscription plan, which seeks to tailor what your organization spends to your usage in our products.

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Conductor SEO

Conductor SEO describes our legacy platform before moving to our new Conductor AI subscription plan. Some features may not be supported in Conductor SEO in the future, so be sure to switch your account to our new subscription model promptly.

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Conductor Intelligence

Conductor Intelligence is Conductor’s platform for tracking keyword rankings, page performance, market share, and AI search visibility—combining traditional SEO and AI search (AEO) performance in a single, unified reporting layer.

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Conductor Creator

Conductor Creator is Conductor’s content creation and optimization platform. It helps you produce data-driven content that wins in AI and organic search through real-time search intelligence, AI-assisted drafting, and brand-aware guidance.

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Conductor Monitoring

Conductor Monitoring is Conductor’s 24/7 real-time technical SEO monitoring solution. It offers real-time alerts, intelligent crawling that prioritizes your most important pages, and integration with Conductor Intelligence. (ContentKing and Conductor Website Monitoring are previous names for this product.)

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ContentKing

ContentKing and Conductor Website Monitoring are previous names for our Conductor Monitoring product. You may see images or other references to these brand names in older content.

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Searchlight

Conductor Searchlight is the former name of the Conductor platform. You may see references to Searchlight—especially in previous correspondence, older articles and training videos, or in other media on our site.

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Explorer

Explorer is the former name for Conductor Intelligence’s Research feature. You may continue to see references to Explorer on our Knowledge Base, on our website, or in other content about Conductor’s platform.

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Conductor for Google Chrome

Conductor for Google Chrome is Conductor’s enterprise SEO Chrome extension. It provides keyword research, on-page audits, technical SEO analysis, and live editing tools directly from your browser.

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workspaces

Workspaces are Conductor’s customizable data reporting tools. Workspaces offer flexible ways to organize and personalize how you and your company view, analyze, and share search intelligence. You can collect views of data from throughout Conductor in one place and add customized content to accompany it.

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click-through curve

A click-through curve is the set of click-through-rate assumptions, by rank position, that Conductor uses to calculate Modeled Traffic. You can select from pre-set curves (such as Standard, B2C, or B2B) or create custom curves that match your business model.

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Web properties & keywords

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comparison web property

Comparison web properties represent traditional business competitors, industry competitors, online competitors, or other web properties for which you want to gather data to compare with your tracked web properties. Account owners determine which comparison web properties Conductor collects data for in the Web Properties activity.

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web property group

The content you create for your audience exists across many different sites, hosted on different web properties—domains you own, or even branded content on third-party sites. When you add a web property to Conductor, you add it to a collection of web properties called a web property group. These groups contain one or more web properties that you want to track together, so you can report on their performance on search engine results pages for a single set of keywords and see a more holistic view of that performance.

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keyword

Keywords are the topics your audience types into search engines. In Conductor, a tracked keyword represents the keyword a person enters into a search engine in a particular place and on a particular type of device. When you track a keyword in Conductor, you select this combination of keyword, search engine, location, and device.

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keyword group

A keyword group in Conductor is a collection of keywords that you want to track together. Viewing your keyword data at an aggregate level is an effective way to help connect your SEO efforts with your business objectives, get market share data, and gain competitive insight.

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smart keyword group

A smart keyword group is a keyword group that updates automatically based on rules you define. As you track new keywords or adjust the group’s criteria, keywords are automatically added or removed.

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standard keyword group

A standard keyword group is a keyword group you build manually from a specific list of keywords you want to track together.

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Keyword Bulk Update

Keyword Bulk Update is a tool in Conductor that allows you to create or edit keywords for your account in bulk. This tool uses a Microsoft Excel file that you download from Conductor, make changes to, and then upload back in with your changes.

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preferred URL

A preferred URL for a keyword is the landing page you want to rank for that particular keyword. Each tracked keyword can have one preferred URL.

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premium keywords

Premium keywords allow you to track keywords on premium search engines, such as 360, Baidu, Daum, Naver, Seznam, Shenma, and Sogou.

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prime keywords

Represented by a star icon, the prime designation lets you mark a keyword as a favorite, important, or any other designation that you want to track.

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Daily keyword tracking

Daily keyword tracking provides near-constant monitoring of high-priority keywords, with data published daily rather than weekly. It’s available for keywords where continuous performance monitoring is critical to your business needs.

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monthly search volume

Monthly search volume (sometimes abbreviated to MSV) is the number of times people searched a keyword during a month. It tells you the keyword’s “search demand”—how popular the keyword is during that month. More popular keywords have higher search demand and drive more traffic to their top search results because more people search for them.

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organic traffic

Conductor considers organic traffic to be traffic that generates at least one session attributed to organic search in your integrated analytics platform.

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Modeled Traffic

Modeled Traffic (formerly known as TrueTraffic) is Conductor’s solution for discovering how much organic traffic your content drives based on when it appears in the results for a given keyword. Modeled Traffic calculates the traffic generated by individual keywords based on their online visibility, consumer demand models, and behavior models. With a clearer picture of the keywords driving traffic to your site, you can make informed decisions on how to prioritize your content creation and search initiatives.

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page group

Page groups show you aggregated page data relevant to your business. Page groups are the page-level equivalent of your keyword groups. Each group should contain pages that are similar and closely related or have something in common.

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ranked keyword

If a page you report on appears without traffic data, the likely reason is that it was not in the top 10,000 pages (or 100,000 pages, if you have upgraded) receiving organic traffic on your tracked web property.

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Recommendations

Recommendations are AI-curated, prioritized suggestions that surface the highest-impact next steps for your team. Conductor evaluates data signals to identify gaps or threats and assigns priority scores based on severity indicators.

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annotation

Annotations are custom notes you create on the Pages, Page Details, and Keywords reports to track SEO and content activities—such as algorithm changes, campaign events, or industry-relevant moments—alongside Conductor’s automatically-detected content changes.

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Ranks & results

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standard rank

Standard rank refers to the rank associated with standard link results on the search engine results pages, as distinct from universal results. Standard rank does not take universal results into account (outside the few exceptions outlined in the Knowledge Base).

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true rank

True rank is the ranking assigned to universal search results. True Rank aggregates standard rank with universal results to give you a more holistic view of a user’s search experience.

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universal rank

Universal rank reflects the rank of a particular result within a set of ranking universal results for a keyword. For example, a Carousel result might appear with a True Rank of 3, but each result within the Carousel has its own Universal Rank—the first being 1, the next 2, and so on.

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universal result types

Universal search results provide content that goes beyond standard results, including other forms of digital content. In Conductor, True Rank aggregates these different types of results to provide a holistic sense of how your content ranks, beyond standard rank.

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top ranker

Top rankers represent those pages (outside of your own) that are ranking in certain positions on a search engine results page (SERP).

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visibility zones

A visibility zone is a range of rank positions. Conductor considers the top 100 rank positions as having 5 distinct zones:
  • Hyper Traffic (positions 1–3)
  • Traffic (positions 4–10)
  • Striking Distance (positions 11–20)
  • Emerging (positions 21–30)
  • Developmental Zone (positions 31–100)
Visibility zones are used in Conductor for filtering reports and in charts to help you understand a site’s rankings across many keywords.

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market share

Market share is the percentage of results that brands own across search engine results pages for your tracked keywords. It can be measured across the top position, the top 5, or the top 10 positions on the SERP.

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weighted vs. not weighted market share

Weighted market share factors in each keyword’s search volume, so high-volume keywords have a greater impact on the result. Not weighted market share treats all keywords equally, regardless of their search volume.

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AI Search Performance

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brand

In AI Search Performance reporting, a brand is the presence and positioning of your organization’s identity—or its products and services—across the AI search landscape. Conductor identifies brand presence in AI results through mentions and citations across various topics.

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website

In AI Search Performance reporting, a website refers to all of the web properties included in a configured web property group, which may include social channels or other off-site content tracked with Conductor.

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topic

In AI Search Performance reporting, a “topic” refers to a thematic area around which AI search engines organize information. AI Search Performance reporting includes market share analysis based on mentions and citations at the topic level, and further exploration into the prompts that represent each topic.

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prompt

A “prompt” refers to the terms or phrases that users enter into AI search engines. Each prompt you track belongs to a tracked “topic” and reflects how a user might signal their interest in that topic. Conductor analyzes your tracked prompts to understand how your brand performs for topics in terms of visibility in AI search results.

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persona

A “persona” refers to an example of the type of person who might be searching for one of your topics.

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search intent

Search intent is the reason behind a person’s online search—what someone wants to find when they enter words or phrases into a search engine. Conductor’s AI engine recognizes intrinsic search intent (the meaning behind the words) across multiple languages, identifying types such as Informational, Commercial, Transactional, and Navigational.

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citation

A “citation” is when Conductor identifies a link to your website among the sources an AI search engine used to create an AI search result.

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mention

A “mention” is when Conductor identifies one of your brands as appearing in the text of an AI search result.

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sentiment score

The sentiment score measures, on a scale of 1–10, the overall negative, neutral, and positive tone of AI search responses that mention your brands. A score of 1 indicates mostly-negative sentiment and 10 indicates mostly-positive sentiment.

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sentiment category

Sentiment categories are the common themes Conductor’s AI engine assigns to the statements driving positive and negative sentiment in AI responses—such as Health, Quality, Price, User-friendliness, Popularity, Ethics, Service, Experience, or Misc.

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share of voice

Share of voice is the percentage of results that brands own across AI search responses for your tracked prompts.

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AI response credits

AI response credits determine your access to Conductor’s AI Search Performance report. Usage is based on the number and types of prompts you track, with costs varying by AI search engine.

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fan out queries

Fan out queries are the individual research queries an AI search engine generates for a single prompt—breaking the prompt into multiple searches and gathering information from across the web before composing its answer. In AI Search Performance, Conductor shows the fan out queries above each AI response so you can see how AI interprets a prompt and which topics and keywords it treats as relevant. Available for Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok.

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Creator

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Writing Assistant

Writing Assistant is a real-time content authoring tool in Conductor Creator. It provides SEO and AEO/GEO recommendations as you write and edit content before publishing, allowing you to optimize new or existing pages.

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Content Guidance

Content Guidance provides topic- and page-specific content recommendations based on the top-ranking pages in search results. It’s particularly useful for analyzing competitors and getting optimization suggestions during the research phase.

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content profile

A content profile is a reusable profile that consolidates your brand voice, style guide, and compliance rules. Writing Assistant applies it to AI-generated content to ensure consistency with your brand’s identity.

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Content Opportunity Score

The Content Opportunity Score is a metric from 1–100 that reflects where you can best prioritize your SEO efforts. It is calculated based on monthly search volume and keyword rank proximity (positions 11–20), with higher scores indicating better opportunities.

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readability score

The readability score is Conductor’s proprietary measure of how easily an average reader can read a page. It is calculated using the Flesch-Kincaid formula based on word count, syllable count, and sentence structure.

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Health Check

The Health Check is a proprietary, holistic measure (0–100) of a page’s overall effectiveness for organic search. It reflects multiple criteria, weighted by their importance to organic marketing success.

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Conductor Actions

Conductor Actions is a legacy feature that created tasks in Conductor that could be sent to integrated work management apps (like Asana or Jira). Conductor is deprecating this feature in favor of more robust activation tools.If you have existing Actions in your account, you can still access them from the Actions activity: Content > More > Actions. Consider downloading any Actions you might want to keep for future use before the feature is deprecated completely.

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knowledge sources

Knowledge sources are files or plain text you upload as guidance for Conductor’s AI engine when it generates content in Writing Assistant drafts. They provide proprietary data and expert input to ground content in your organization’s authority.

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Monitoring and site data

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Caliperbot

To collect web data, Conductor uses a single web crawler that identifies itself as Caliperbot. Caliperbot crawls your site’s HTML code to provide information and SEO recommendations in Conductor. As it crawls, Caliperbot takes note of on-page elements like title tags, header tags, and other metadata—just like Google’s Googlebot does when it crawls your site to add it to their search index.

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Health Score

In Conductor Monitoring, the Health Score is a metric (with a maximum of 1,000 points) that determines how optimized a page or an entire website is for SEO. Detected issues lower the score; issues on more important pages have a greater impact than those on less important pages.

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issues

An issue is an SEO problem that Conductor Monitoring detects and reports on—at the page level, the platform level, or across the entire website. Issues carry states such as open, closed, ignored, unknown, not required, or not applicable.

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segments

Segments are logical groupings of pages, created dynamically based on filter criteria (or manually, as static segments) to customize reporting and auditing. Conductor provides a default “Important pages” segment based on page importance scores.

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page importance

Page importance is a score from 0–10 assigned to each page relative to others on the site. It is calculated from internal links, page depth, content change frequency, and—optionally—integrated analytics and search engine visit frequency.

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page bundle / page capacity

Your page bundle is the total number of pages you monitor across all of your websites. Page capacity is the maximum number of pages allowed per website, distributed from your overall page bundle.

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indexable vs. non-indexable page

An indexable page can be indexed by search engines—it meets criteria such as having no robots directives blocking indexing and a canonical link pointing to itself. A non-indexable page cannot be indexed, due to robots directives, disallow rules, or canonicals that point elsewhere.

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orphaned page

A URL is considered orphaned in Conductor Monitoring if it has no incoming links and no incoming redirects—meaning it isn’t linked from anywhere else on your website. The Purge orphan pages feature removes these URLs from Conductor Monitoring’s index.

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IndexNow / Real-time IndexNow

IndexNow is a protocol from Microsoft Bing and Yandex that notifies search engines when content is added, updated, or removed. Real-time IndexNow is Conductor Monitoring’s feature that automatically submits important page changes to IndexNow based on triggers and conditions you define.

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change tracking

Change tracking is Conductor Monitoring’s ability to track and report on all changes to your pages—added, removed, modified, or redirected—across your website, with a historical timeline and detailed change information.

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Log File Analysis

Log File Analysis is a Conductor Monitoring feature that ingests log files from your CDN or web servers to track which search engines visit your site, detect crawl patterns, and filter for specific user agents to analyze search engine behavior.

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JavaScript rendering

JavaScript rendering is a Conductor Monitoring feature that executes JavaScript while crawling, so the system can detect content, links, and metadata that are loaded or modified by JavaScript—not just the initial HTML source.

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Developer platform

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Conductor API

The Conductor API is Conductor’s programmatic interface to its search and content intelligence. It covers Data endpoints for traditional and AI search insights, Content endpoints for drafting and optimizing with Conductor Creator, and Configuration endpoints that return the accounts, web properties, and search scope you build requests around. All three share a single base URL and authentication model, so you can adopt one and add the others without re-plumbing your integration.

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Content API

The Content API is Conductor’s API for creating and optimizing drafts with Conductor Creator’s Writing Assistant engine. It lets teams build programmatic content creation and optimization workflows, infusing insights and intelligence into the process, from the beginning.

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MCP (Model Context Protocol)

MCP is a communication protocol that enables AI assistants to safely and predictably connect to Conductor, so they can work with your real data and workflows using natural language—rather than relying on general knowledge.

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MCP tool

An MCP tool is a named, specific action that an AI is allowed to perform through the MCP connection—such as fetching a report or running a defined step. Tools act as approved capabilities on a bounded menu.