The digital friction glossary.

Plain-English definitions for every term behind the Friction Score and the Digital Friction Index.

Digital friction

The wasted effort between demand and a real customer — every point where a business makes it harder than necessary for a ready buyer to find it, trust it and act.

Friction Score

FrictionZero's 0–100 measure of digital commercial friction, scored across five dimensions (higher means less friction). Reproducible from public signals.

Discovery

Dimension: how easily engines and buyers can find and understand a site — indexability, canonical tags, titles, structured data, sitemap.

Website

Dimension: the speed and stability of the experience, measured on mobile via Google Lighthouse — performance, Largest Contentful Paint, layout stability.

Conversion

Dimension: how easily an interested buyer can act — contact paths, instant channels, entry-form length, phone availability.

Trust

Dimension: the credible identity behind the brand — named people, company identity, reviews, accreditations, results.

Authority

Dimension: the evidence of expertise — authority schema, content depth, attributable authorship, outbound citations.

Response

Gated dimension (verified companies only): the speed and quality of commercial follow-up — lead-response time, follow-up, pipeline leakage.

GEO

Generative Engine Optimisation — making content that AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) can understand and cite, typically via unique data and structured markup.

SEO

Search Engine Optimisation — making a site discoverable and rankable in search engines like Google and Bing.

E-E-A-T

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust — Google's framework for assessing content quality. Strengthened by real, attributable authors and verifiable identity.

LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)

How long until the main content of a page appears. A core web vital; under 2.5s is good, over 4s is slow.

CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)

How much a page visually jumps around as it loads. Lower is better; under 0.1 is stable.

Core Web Vitals

Google's set of real-world experience metrics — loading (LCP), interactivity and visual stability (CLS) — used as a ranking signal.

Lighthouse

Google's open, automated tool (behind pagespeed.web.dev) that measures a page's performance, accessibility and more in a headless browser.

Structured data (schema)

Machine-readable markup (JSON-LD) that tells engines what a page is — an Organization, an Article, a FAQ, a Dataset — enabling rich results and AI citations.

Canonical tag

A link that tells search engines which URL is the definitive version of a page, preventing duplicate-content confusion.

Rendered DOM

The page as a browser actually builds it after JavaScript runs — what a customer sees — as opposed to the raw HTML the server first sends.