Glossary
Plain definitions for the terms that come up in AI search, listings, AI projects and website work.
- AEO (answer engine optimization)
- Making a business's information easy for AI assistants and answer engines to find, trust and cite. Largely the same work as GEO.
- AI Overviews
- AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of some Google search results, built from pages Google retrieves.
- Citation
- A source an AI assistant links to or names when it answers. Being cited, or being named on cited pages, drives AI visibility.
- Data aggregator
- A company that collects and distributes business listing data to many directories, maps and apps.
- DKIM
- An email authentication method that signs outgoing messages so receiving servers can verify they weren't altered.
- DMARC
- An email policy that tells receiving servers what to do with messages that fail SPF or DKIM checks, and reports on misuse of your domain.
- Entity
- A distinct, identifiable thing, such as a business, person or place, that search engines and AI models track with consistent facts.
- GEO (generative engine optimization)
- Improving how often and how accurately generative AI tools mention a business. Another name for AEO.
- General Price List (GPL)
- The itemized price list US funeral providers must give consumers under the FTC Funeral Rule.
- Hallucination
- When an AI model states something false with confidence. Grounding answers in retrieved sources reduces it.
- llms.txt
- A plain-text file at a site's root that summarizes the site for large language models.
- MCP (Model Context Protocol)
- An open standard for connecting AI assistants to outside tools and data sources.
- NAP
- Name, address and phone number. Consistent NAP across listings is a core local search signal.
- Outcome-based pricing
- Charging per result, such as a resolved ticket, rather than per seat or per use.
- Proof of concept (POC)
- A short, scoped test of a product with real data and agreed success criteria before purchase.
- RAG (retrieval-augmented generation)
- An AI pattern that retrieves relevant documents first, then has the model answer using them.
- robots.txt
- A file that tells crawlers, including AI crawlers, which parts of a site they may access.
- Schema markup (structured data)
- Code on a web page, usually JSON-LD, that states facts like business type, location and services in a machine-readable form.
- SPF
- An email record listing which servers are allowed to send mail for your domain.
- Zero-click search
- A search that ends without the person clicking any result, often because the answer was shown on the results page.
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