The vocabulary of being recommended.

All terms, A to Z

Look it up, then go build.

A

AI Citations

AI citations are the sources an assistant links or names to justify its answer — the pages it actually read before recommending businesses.

AI Crawler

AI crawlers are the bots AI companies use to fetch web pages, either to train models (like GPTBot) or to retrieve pages live when a user asks a question (like ChatGPT-User or PerplexityBot).

AI Hallucination

A hallucination is an AI assistant stating something false with full confidence — a business that doesn't exist, a service you don't offer, an address you left years ago.

AI Search

AI search is the umbrella term for search experiences where an AI synthesizes the answer — ChatGPT with browsing, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, Copilot.

AI Visibility

AI visibility is how often and how favourably AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity mention a business when people ask them for recommendations.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)

Answer engine optimization is the practice of making a business easy for AI assistants and answer features to quote and recommend: publishing direct, factual, well-structured answers that ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, and voice assistants can lift and attribute.

B

Backlinks

Backlinks are links from other websites to yours — the web's citations.

Branded Search

Branded search is people searching your business by name — a trailing indicator of every other channel working, and the highest-converting traffic that exists.

C

Canonical URL

A canonical URL is the version of a page you declare authoritative when several URLs could serve the same content — with and without trailing slash, tracking parameters, www or not.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Click-through rate is the share of people who saw a listing and clicked it — clicks divided by impressions.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is the share of visitors who take the action a page exists for — calling, booking, submitting a form.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are Google's user-experience measurements — how fast a page shows its main content, how quickly it responds to interaction, and how much the layout shifts while loading.

Crawl Budget

Crawl budget is the attention a search engine allocates to fetching a site's pages.

D

Doorway Pages

Doorway pages are near-identical pages created per city or keyword purely to catch searches — the same template with a place name swapped in.

E

E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T — experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness — is Google's framework for what its quality systems reward, weighted heaviest in categories that affect money or health.

Entity (SEO)

An entity is a distinct thing search engines and AI systems can identify and connect information about — a specific business, person, or place, independent of any keyword.

F

Featured Snippet

A featured snippet is the boxed answer Google lifts from a page and shows at the top of results — the classic 'position zero.

G

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

Generative engine optimization is the academic name for improving how often generative AI systems cite or mention a source in their answers.

Google AI Mode

AI Mode is Google's conversational search experience: a full-page AI answer with follow-up questions, distinct from the AI Overview summaries that sit above classic results.

Google AI Overviews

AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries Google shows above traditional results for many searches.

Google Business Profile

A Google Business Profile is the free listing that represents a business on Google Search and Maps — the entity behind local pack rankings, review collection, and much of the evidence AI assistants read when recommending local businesses.

GPTBot

GPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler for gathering training data for its models.

Grounding (Web Search)

Grounding is an AI assistant's use of live retrieved sources — usually web search — to answer, instead of relying on training memory alone.

I

Indexation

Indexation is whether a page is in Google's index at all — discovered, crawled, evaluated, and stored so it can rank.

Internal Linking

Internal links connect pages within a site, and they do three jobs at once: route visitors to the next useful page, distribute ranking equity from strong pages to new ones, and teach machines the site's structure — which pages matter and what relates to what.

J

JSON-LD

JSON-LD is the format Google recommends for structured data: a script block of JSON, using Schema.

K

Knowledge Cutoff

A knowledge cutoff is the date after which an AI model's training data ends.

Knowledge Panel

A knowledge panel is the information box Google shows for a recognized entity — a business, person, or organization — assembled from structured data, authoritative sites, and Google's own graph.

L

Large Language Model (LLM)

A large language model is the AI system underneath assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude: a neural network trained on vast amounts of text to predict language, which lets it answer questions, summarize sources, and make recommendations.

Lead Intake

Lead intake is everything between a prospect's first contact and a scheduled, qualified conversation — response speed, qualifying questions, booking, reminders, follow-up.

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Local Citations

Local citations are mentions of a business's name, address, and phone on other websites — directories, maps services, industry associations, chambers of commerce.

Local Pack

The local pack is the map-plus-three-listings block Google shows for searches with local intent.

Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are the specific, lower-volume queries that make up most searches in aggregate — 'emergency plumber open sunday north austin' rather than 'plumber.

M

Marketing Attribution

Attribution is knowing which marketing produced which customer — connecting a signed client back to the search, page, or call that started it.

N

NAP Consistency

NAP consistency means a business's name, address, and phone number appear identically everywhere they are published — website, Google Business Profile, directories, social profiles.

O

Openness Score

The openness score is our 0-100 measure of how unsettled a market's AI recommendations are — the equally weighted mean of leader concentration, cross-assistant consensus, and single-mention churn.

P

People Also Ask (PAA)

People Also Ask is the expandable question box in Google results, fed by pages that answer specific questions cleanly.

Programmatic SEO

Programmatic SEO generates many pages from data plus templates — one page per city, product, or comparison.

Prompt

A prompt is the input a user gives an AI assistant — the question, instructions, and context it answers.

R

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

Retrieval-augmented generation is the technique behind grounded AI answers: before responding, the system retrieves relevant documents — search results, web pages, database records — and generates its answer from them.

Review Velocity

Review velocity is the rate at which a business earns new reviews — steady recency, not lifetime count.

S

Search Intent

Search intent is what a searcher is actually trying to accomplish — learn something (informational), find a specific place (navigational), compare options (commercial), or act now (transactional).

SERP

SERP stands for search engine results page — everything a search returns: ads, AI Overviews, local packs, organic listings, snippets, and question boxes.

Share of Voice (AI)

Share of voice in AI answers is the portion of recommendation mentions a business captures across repeated questions in its market — named in 10 of 18 recorded answers is a 56% share.

Striking-Distance Keywords

Striking-distance keywords are queries where a page already ranks just off the first page or low on it — roughly positions 8 through 25.

Structured Data

Structured data is machine-readable markup — usually JSON-LD using Schema.

T

Thin Content

Thin content is a page that gives a visitor almost nothing for the click — not short content, but low-substance content: boilerplate, scraped fragments, placeholder location pages, generic filler.

Topical Authority

Topical authority is a site's earned credibility on a subject, built by covering it deeply and coherently — connected pages answering the questions the topic raises, cited by others, consistent over time.

Z

Zero-Click Search

A zero-click search ends without the searcher visiting any website: the answer appears directly on the results page via featured snippets, AI Overviews, local packs, or knowledge panels.