Resources

The growth and AI-search glossary.

Plain-English definitions of the terms we use, from answer-engine optimization to identity resolution. Written so a person and an AI can both understand exactly what each one means.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)

The practice of optimizing your content so AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews quote your business by name. Where traditional SEO aims for a ranking, AEO aims to be the cited source inside the answer, and it leans on clear question-and-answer formatting, structured data, and machine-readable summaries.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

A close cousin of AEO, GEO is optimizing specifically for generative AI systems that produce written answers rather than a list of links. The goal is the same: be the source the model pulls from and names. In practice AEO and GEO overlap almost entirely.

AI Overviews

Google's AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of many search results, answering the query directly and citing a few sources. Being one of those cited sources sends qualified traffic and builds authority, and well-organized, structured content is far more likely to be pulled into an Overview.

Large Language Model (LLM)

The type of AI that powers tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. An LLM is trained on huge amounts of text to predict and generate language, which lets it answer questions in natural sentences. When these models answer a question about your business, you want them working from accurate information about you.

llms.txt

A plain-text file placed at the root of a website, similar to robots.txt but written for AI crawlers. It gives models a clean, human-written summary of what your business does and which pages matter most. It is an emerging standard for helping AI understand and represent your site correctly.

Identity Resolution

Technology that matches anonymous website visitors to real, contactable records using compliant, opt-in data networks. Instead of losing the roughly ninety-eight percent of visitors who never fill out a form, you recover a share of them as leads you can follow up with, and it runs without a pop-up or extra step for the visitor.

Connected TV (CTV)

Television advertising delivered through internet-connected streaming apps like Hulu, Peacock, and Roku, shown on the actual TV screen. It combines the impact of traditional TV with digital targeting and measurement, so ads reach a chosen audience and can be tied to real outcomes.

Programmatic Advertising

The automated buying and placing of digital ads across websites, apps, and streaming in real time, using data to target the right person. It replaces manual ad buying with software that optimizes toward your goal, putting your message in front of the right audience efficiently across the open web.

Geofencing

An advertising technique that targets people's mobile devices based on the physical locations they visit, such as a competitor's store, an event, or a neighborhood, and can then measure who later visited your business. It is precise, local, and useful for driving foot traffic.

Attribution

The process of connecting a sale, visit, or lead back to the marketing that caused it. Good attribution tells you which channels actually drove results instead of guessing from clicks and impressions, and it is what lets you put budget behind what works.

Core Web Vitals

Google's set of metrics for real-world page experience, measuring how fast a page loads, how quickly it becomes interactive, and how stable it is as it renders. They are a ranking factor and a direct driver of conversions, because slow pages lose visitors, and lightweight hand-coded sites score well on them by design.

Schema Markup (Structured Data)

Code added to a page that tells search engines and AI exactly what the content is, such as an organization, an FAQ, a product, or an article. It removes guesswork and makes your content far more likely to be understood, quoted, and shown as a rich result, which makes it foundational to both SEO and AEO.

Static Site

A website built from pre-rendered HTML files rather than generated on the fly by a database and server, the way platforms like WordPress work. Static sites are faster, more secure, and cheaper to host, with nothing to hack and nothing to slow the page down, and they give search engines and AI clean, readable markup.

Technical SEO

The behind-the-scenes work that makes a site easy for search engines to crawl, understand, and rank, including site speed, clean architecture, mobile-friendliness, structured data, and indexing. It is the foundation the rest of SEO is built on, and without it great content struggles to rank.

Local SEO

Optimizing a business to show up for location-based searches, like 'near me' queries and searches that include a city or neighborhood. It centers on the Google Business Profile, consistent listings, reviews, and locally relevant content, and for any business that serves a specific area it is where most of the demand lives.

Google Business Profile

The free business listing that appears in Google Search and Maps, showing your hours, location, photos, reviews, and posts. A fully optimized profile is one of the biggest factors in ranking for local searches, and keeping it accurate and active directly affects how often you show up.

Map Pack

The block of three local business listings, shown with a map, that Google places at the top of many local searches. Landing in the map pack is prime real estate for a local business because it sits above the regular results, and reviews, proximity, and a strong Business Profile drive placement.

Lifecycle Marketing

Marketing that reaches customers with the right message at each stage of their relationship with you, from first purchase to loyal regular. It runs through automated email and SMS flows like welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase, and win-back, and because you already own the audience it is one of the highest-ROI channels there is.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

The practice of improving the percentage of visitors who take a desired action, such as booking a call or making a purchase. It combines clear design, fast pages, strong copy, and testing to get more value from the traffic you already have, and small lifts in conversion compound into meaningful revenue.

Retargeting

Showing ads to people who have already visited your site or engaged with your brand, to bring them back to convert. Because these people already know you, retargeting typically converts far better than cold advertising, which makes it a core part of most omni-channel campaigns.

First-Party Data

Information a business collects directly from its own customers and audience, such as email subscribers, purchase history, and site behavior. Unlike third-party data it is owned by you, more accurate, and more durable as privacy and tracking rules tighten, so building and using it well is increasingly central to modern marketing.

Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH)

Digitally delivered advertising on screens in the physical world, such as billboards, transit displays, and place-based screens. Modern DOOH can be bought programmatically and targeted by location and audience, and tied back to outcomes, which extends an omni-channel campaign into the real world.

Free audit

Want this working for your site?

Get a free, plain-English audit of your search and AI visibility, and the fixes that will move the needle fastest.

Get your free audit →