Most SaaS glossaries are dead pages. Here's what a useful one looks like.

0:00Open your analytics software and find your glossary. Look at the conversion rate. If you're like most SaaS companies, those pages get a lot of traffic and do absolutely nothing with it. You have hundreds of visits every single month and zero sign-ups. I'll show you why most glossaries are dead weight, what's about to make them worse and what the ones that actually work do differently. I'm Deian and this is Before They Buy. A few years ago, glossaries became a really big content marketing staple.

0:31So the logic was quite simple. You build a page for every what is something search in your category. Collect the traffic, build authority. So this could be if you're a CRM, you do what is a CRM and all these related terms to it. And I guess it worked because MailChimp's glossary pulls 600,000 search visits every month. But numbers like that made every SaaS content team want one. The problem is that the dashboards don't show you this.

1:03But here's what those dashboards don't show you. What happens after someone reads the page? Most glossary pages are... Most glossary pages are just dictionary entries you have like three paragraphs defining a term, maybe a little example a footer link to the blog and nothing else so the reader gets their answer and leaves you got a page view and i congratulate on it but it's just a definition and it's not a customer so this has already been a problem and now it's just

1:33getting worse Gaetano Dinardi published data on what happened to informational content after AI overviews rolled out. One of his B2B clients, a cybersecurity company, saw a 70% drop in glossary traffic and other verticals saw similar drops, some over 50% even. And the reason is obvious once you see it, right? If you have a term like what is lead scoring, this is exactly the kind of question AI answers in the search results so people are not even getting to your website anymore.

2:08Sparktoro measured this 58.5% of US Google searches now end without a single click. So your glossary page is competing with an answer that is already on the screen. So the pages that were already dead end are now losing their only value, which is traffic. Now, not all glossary pages are the same. I think about them in three different tiers. Tier 1 is the dictionary entry. So this is what is a specific term. What is CRM, for example.

2:40Let's say 200 words long, a definition pulled from Wikipedia with different adjectives. With different adjectives. There are no internal links, no CTA, no product connection. AI overviews will eat these alive. and if ChatGPT can answer the question in one sentence, then your page has basically no reason to exist. Tier 2 are the well-written dead-end glossaries. These are the ones that 4 use. They're a little bit longer, they're well-written, maybe they rank on page 1.

3:12Your traffic dashboard looks healthy if you have this one, but there's no next step. The reader learns the term and closes the tab. Your traffic goes up, but your pipeline stays flat. a lot of best practice glossaries live here. They followed the playbook but stopped at the definition. Let's come to... And then there's the third... And then there's the third... And then there is the third tier, the funnel node. The page still ranks for the informational query. But every element on the page connects back to the product.

3:45The definition is written in the context of what your software actually does. There are CTAs throughout, not just one at the bottom. There are links to comparison pages, features pages, case studies. The reader showed up to learn a word and now they are left knowing what your product does. Most glossaries make it to tier 2 and stop. They did the SEO work, but they skipped the conversion work. Personio is the clearest example I found. They are an HR software company and

4:18their glossary, which they actually call the HR lexicon, has over 540 pages and drives 90% of their total organic traffic. Foundation Inc. did a deep breakdown on how this actually works. The patrons aren't really definitions, they are product connected content. So something like what is employee onboarding? Doesn't just explain the concept, it leads into Personio's onboarding module. So every page has between 4 and 9 CTAs.

4:49There's a sticky sidebar, there are inline prompts, there's even an embedded product demo. So the glossary entry is the top of a funnel, not the end of a visit. And they also target regionally. 48 pages written specifically for UK and Ireland HR terms pull over 210,000 visits on their own. So they didn't write one glossary, they wrote multiple glossaries. And the result speaks for itself because over 400,000 monthly visits and an

5:22estimated 3.3 million a year in traffic value. Green Flag Digital did something very similar for a cybersecurity SaaS client in 2025. They built a 100-page glossary, but the approach was a little bit different from your typical what-is-x template. Every page was written in the context of the client's product. So instead of what-is-phishing, they made a page about phishing in the context of what the client's security platform detects and prevents. The other things AI can't replicate, interactive tools, calculators, product demos.

5:58If you already got the definition from an AI overview, the page still gives you a reason to stay. Organic traffic went up 480% after these changes. More than half the client's top pages are now glossary entries. The glossary drives nearly half their total site traffic, and they got cited by AI search engines twice as often as Palo Alto Networks, a competitor with far more domain authority. The pages built to survive AI search ended up getting amplified by it. Now, to put things into practice, pull up one of your glossary pages if you

6:32have it, and run through this. Does the page mention your product? And not in the nav. I don't mean in the nav bar, I mean in the content. If someone could copy paste the text into a competitor's site and it would still make sense, the page isn't connected to your product. Count the CTAs. If there's one button at the bottom and nothing else, then you've got a two-tier page. The glossaries that convert have multiple entry points, sidebar, inline, demo embed, and so on. Read the first paragraph and tell me is it a definition you could find on Wikipedia

7:05or is it written in the context of what your buyer actually cares about? What is lead scoring should sound different on a marketing automation site than on a CRM site. Next check your analytics. What's the bounce rate on your glossary? What is the next page people visit? If the answer is high and none then the page is a dead end and the traffic while real doesn't bring any value. Here's what I want you to do now. Pick your highest traffic glossary page, just a single page. Add a sticky sidebar CTA.

7:37Write one paragraph that connects the term to your product and don't make it a sales pitch, just in context. And then link to your most relevant comparison page or a feature page. Add an inline CTA after the second section. This turns a tier 2 page into a 3 page. This will turn your tier 2 page into a tier 3 page. This is just one page that you need to spend a few minutes in one morning. And in a few months, check your analytics and see if the exit rate changed.

8:11If you don't have a glossary yet, don't build a dictionary. Build 10 pages where every definition connects to your product. This is Before They Buy. I'm Deian, see you next week.