Over the course of 2025, we built a 100+ page glossary for a cybersecurity SaaS, in an era when informational content is being displaced by AI answer engines and Google snippets. Here’s what we learned.
Over the course of 2025, we built a 100+ page glossary for a cybersecurity SaaS, in an era when informational content is being displaced by AI answer engines and Google snippets. So what happened?
Glossaries and dictionaries have long been the bread and butter of B2B SaaS Companies. After all, they:
- Lay claim to an entire industry’s lexicon
- Demonstrate mastery of the niche in general
- Build trust with searchers as they navigate unfamiliar industry options en route to the “buy now” button
- Build authority
- Allow the brand to embed its opinion while educating
And they work to bring in traffic: for Mailchimp, a marketing glossary has netted ~600K monthly search visits. In mid-2024, Ahrefs’ SEO glossary drew around 67K visitors. In SaaS, glossary frontrunner Personio nets ~400K monthly users, 95% of the site’s organic traffic, from its “lexicon” content. And deal-modeling Mosaic helps cement its authority with a glossary that nets 43K monthly visitors, ranking for over 20K keywords.
It’s not time to let go — yet.
So when, in late 2024, a cybersecurity challenger brand came to us asking for a cybersecurity glossary to outrank the standard offerings from their competitors, we wanted to say, “yes.” But we also recognized we were standing on the cusp of SEO changes that made the move risky.
So we said, “Yes.” But we also leaned into future-proofing the glossary with what we thought could safeguard it from SEO storms to come. This article is all about:
- What ideas we implemented
- How those ideas worked
- How they’re still working (or not)
- What we’d do differently today
The Challenge: Should You Create a Glossary to Drive Traffic?
Glossaries aren’t the simple “win” they used to be.
First, upstream traffic and downstream buyers have never been neatly linked.
If tracking were possible on-site, it would be even more challenging when it’s obscured by research that never leaves the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
And today, top-of-funnel readers searchers aren’t often learning about basic “what is” terms from company sites. They’re less likely to click on informational content: 58.5% of US and 59.7% of European searches end without a click.
On top of that, the golden age of glossaries came before the advent of AI answer engines, which could further erode top-of-funnel traffic.
As a “pure visits” play for short definitions, the trendlines are against glossary die-hards, who will certainly struggle with lower click-through rates (CTRs) and in-SERP answers stealing the spotlight.
So, because nearly 91% of search traffic is still coming from Google in 2025 and it’s a justifiable win for clients, we framed traffic as a present-tense goal. But we also incorporated AI engine ideas that not only differentiated our challenger brand but will also solidify the glossary’s relevance going forward.
Here are the takeaways for:
- Strategy
- Writing
- Measurement
How Do I Strategize Glossary Content in 2026?
We accounted for each of the funnel problems facing informational content by:
- Prioritizing long-tail queries where AI shines and where previous glossaries hadn’t yet been optimized. We also clustered those keywords by decision questions and trade-offs rather than on internal topical categories. We wanted to optimize for the territory where readers leave the AI engine summaries to look for nuance.
- Treating AEO as a distribution channel and planning for “zero click” exposure. Though we settled on keywords “the old-fashioned way,” combining interest and ranking difficulty, we made sure we had AEO citation optimization elements in every single entry, so SEO traffic wasn’t their only purpose.
- Safeguarding SEO traffic by baking in engagement, comparison, and experience elements in each glossary entry at the planning stage. From tables to case studies, comparisons, expert quotes, interviews, calculators, evaluation checklists, and contextual blocks comparing and contrasting multiple terms, add-ons that AI can’t touch are a significant part of maintaining readership from the people our client wanted most — serious, thoughtful searchers happy to dig deeper.
How Did We Write Glossary Content in 2026?
Apart from including planned elements like tables and interviews, how do you buckle down in the writing stage to craft content that’s in it for the long haul? Our primary approaches were:
- Writing for context, not definition. Sure, it’s a glossary. But we wanted to get to the generic definition quickly, then spend time explaining what it meant in context: in the environment of our clients, with their usual constraints, for example, for CISOs facing typical problems. Our style guide borrowed not from the SEO competition, but from demos, client interviews, and CISO groups and Substacks. Keyword scores had to go hand in hand with audience optimization and writing directly to our human readers’ current situations.
- Tripling down on our style guide, editing consistency, and using a single writer’s “voice” as much as possible. AI is sensitive to drifting definitions and logic that come from multiple voices and perspectives. A model may blend definitions or ignore your definitions entirely when you describe terms in different ways or offer up contradictions. So, start by making sure you have a clean sentence to lift and quote for important definitions across pages. This is a deviation from traditional SEO, where “ranking for more terms” might make slight differences in definitions desirable.
- Write for robots with consistency, snack-sized blocks, and clear, rather than clever, headers. Write for humans by nailing the follow-ups. Respect crawlers by emphasizing clear answers in chunks they can “lift” for their users. But recognize that the next steps for customers depend heavily on their own industry, stack, size, and constraints. AI engines tell their users, “It depends.” But websites can still win traffic by addressing follow-up questions with specific answers.
- Interview product leaders & executives. Opinions and thought leadership are more valuable than ever, and true insight is harder to come by. We amassed a bank of quotes and explanations from the client’s most renowned internal experts and used them to add depth and context to the glossary definitions.
- Leverage your humanity. I don’t trust arguments that come from pamphlets thrown out of airplanes, unattached to a writer, a thinker, or an authority. And neither should you. Use personal experience in your glossary, with examples and narratives that competitors and AI don’t have. Use “I” and “we” when you can. It’s called life experience. And it’s valuable.
How Do I Measure Glossary Content in 2026?
Performance is a moving target in 2026. Glossary content was once a traffic golden goose, and that’s no longer the case. But is it time to double down on citation numbers? Not quite. We believe now is the time for:
- Splitting performance into traffic value and visibility value. It’s still important to track clicks and downstream site paths for terms that drive traffic. But it’s just as important to track impressions and share of SERP features, including AI snippets or presence, for terms where you’re increasingly “read on Google” but not on-site.
- Create a citation watchlist for measuring lift. Find out which queries trigger AI overviews, whether impressions are rising, whether clicks flatten, and whether branded search is rising with an increase in glossary exposure.
- Forget about last-click attribution. Instead, measure assisted buying behavior that goes beyond page-level traffic. Glossary pages still win when they increase follow-on behaviors, even when first interactions don’t include clicks.
How Did It Go?
Traffic is still king.
For our client, organic search traffic is up 480%, with 12 pages of the top 20 traffic pages coming from the glossary. Overall, glossary entries drive 42.6% of the website’s total traffic. That’s especially high, but not wildly unusual for SaaS companies with well-executed glossaries.
Six months post-engagement and a year after content began to grow the site, “freshness” isn’t yet an issue. Overall, traffic continues its jerky upward trajectory, accentuated by waves of traffic from cybersecurity incidents. And referring domains, which grew from ~100 to ~350 during our engagement, are climbing steadily.
In AEO, our client gets twice as many citations as the longstanding security giant, Palo Alto Networks. They’re also beating out CrowdStrike, Wikipedia, and TechTarget.
Because we’re optimized for both types of searches at the same time, we’re seeing successful outcomes in both realms. As AEO research grows in prominence, we expect citations to continue to outpace competitors’, giving our client a first-mover advantage in AEO-optimized glossary content.
What Would We Do Differently?
Our client, which initially hoped for content that spoke to a higher-level buyer than the competition, was caught in a Catch-22: traffic was clearly higher for more basic-level queries. Did they want to win traffic or woo the C-Suite?
Their answer: yes.
It’s one thing to say you’re solving for both traffic and nuance, but execution is another beast, and in the end, it’s hard to walk a tightrope of comprehensive knowledge for the C-Suite and Google traffic’s “basic info” dictates, with all the keywords your chosen query would like you to include.
The “do it all” approach led to lengthy, comprehensive pieces. While its bite-sized architecture and multiple sections, including FAQs, help it continue to perform, this isn’t what we preach about the future of SEO. In this case, the glossary’s future-proofing will come from:
- Monitoring all pages and doubling down on winners on a quarterly basis
- Keeping all pages fresh and updated, and in the future, possibly spun off from a hub page entry
- Maintaining a content library that’s responsive to both SEO and AEO updates
The AEO future will mean more paring, more interlinking, and shorter content pages than this project’s style guide hit accurately.
But as shorter, multi-purpose content becomes the norm, even nuanced glossaries with great interviews, opinions, experience narratives, and comparison charts will have to package those elements in a lighter-weight format.
How to do it? That’s still the biggest AEO challenge we all face.
Leave a Reply