HTTPS
HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure
In one line
HTTPS (HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure) is HTTP traffic encrypted with TLS — and a baseline ranking signal Google has confirmed publicly.
Going deeper
HTTPS is HTTP encrypted with TLS. Google confirmed it as a lightweight ranking signal back in 2014, and at this point it's effectively a hygiene requirement rather than a competitive edge.
The operational checklist is short. Every URL on the domain should serve HTTPS, plain HTTP should 301 to its HTTPS counterpart, and the certificate plus all sub-resources have to be clean — no expired certs, no mixed content.
It is not a direct GEO citation signal, but it sets a trust baseline. When an AI weighs source credibility, a non-HTTPS domain tends to start at a disadvantage before any of the content is even read.
Sources
Related terms
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the infrastructure-level work — crawling, indexing, rendering, speed, structured data — that makes a site readable and rankable for search engines in the first place.
SEOGooglebot
Googlebot is Google's official web crawler used to build the search index — controllable through robots.txt rules and identifiable by its User-Agent string.
SEOTTFB
TTFB (Time to First Byte) measures how long it takes from a request being sent until the first byte of the response arrives — a foundational metric for server responsiveness and LCP work.
SEOCDN
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) caches your content on edge servers worldwide so users are served from a nearby node — directly improving TTFB, LCP and overall page speed.
SEOMobile SEO
Mobile SEO covers the rendering, speed and UX of your site on mobile devices — effectively a baseline expectation since Google moved to mobile-first indexing.