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Glossary
The AI marketing glossary
67 plain-English definitions across AI search, SEO, reviews, outreach, campaigns and APIs - no hype, and no jargon left unexplained.
AI search & answer engines
- AI Visibility
- How often - and how prominently - a brand appears in AI-generated answers from assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity. It is the AI-era counterpart of rankings: instead of tracking positions on a results page, you track whether models mention or cite you when people ask relevant questions. See also: SEO & AI Visibility
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
- The practice of structuring content so answer engines - systems that reply with a single synthesized answer instead of a list of links - can find, understand and reuse it. Typical AEO work includes direct question-and-answer formatting, structured data and concise, quotable summaries.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
- Optimizing content to be retrieved and cited by generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews. It overlaps heavily with AEO; the term stresses influencing what generative models say about a topic or brand, not just where a page ranks.
- Answer engine
- A search system that answers questions directly instead of returning ranked links - Perplexity, ChatGPT with browsing, or Google's AI Overviews. Answer engines synthesize replies from sources they retrieve, which is why being retrievable and citable now matters as much as ranking.
- LLM (Large Language Model)
- A machine-learning model trained on very large amounts of text to understand and generate language - the technology behind ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. LLMs power answer engines, chat assistants and most modern AI marketing tools.
- LLM citation
- When an AI assistant names or links a specific source in its answer. Citations are how brands earn visible credit in AI search: the cited page gets the mention, and - in engines that link out - the click. See also: SEO & AI Visibility
- AI Overviews
- Google's AI-generated summary block shown above the classic results for many queries. It synthesizes an answer from several sources and links a handful of them, which changes how much attention and traffic the standard listings below receive.
- RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
- A technique where an AI model first retrieves relevant documents and then writes its answer grounded in them. Answer engines are essentially RAG systems running over the web - which is why crawlable, well-structured pages are what get quoted.
- Hallucination
- When an AI model states something false with confidence - an invented fact, source or number. Hallucinations are the core risk of unreviewed AI content; grounding answers in retrieved sources and keeping a human approval step are the standard mitigations.
- llms.txt
- A plain-text file served at a site's root that gives AI systems a concise, machine-readable overview of what the site is and where its key content lives. It complements robots.txt: robots.txt says what may be crawled, llms.txt says what is worth reading. See also: Developer hub
- AI crawler
- A bot that fetches web content for AI systems - for model training (like GPTBot) or for answering live queries (like PerplexityBot). Sites declare access policies for these crawlers in robots.txt, separately from classic search-engine bots.
SEO fundamentals
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
- The discipline of improving a site's visibility in organic - unpaid - search results, spanning technical health, content relevance and authority signals such as links. Modern SEO increasingly includes visibility in AI-generated answers, too. See also: SEO & AI Visibility
- SERP (Search Engine Results Page)
- Everything a search engine shows for a query: classic links, ads, maps, AI summaries, images and more. The non-link blocks are called SERP features; ranking work is about winning the right spots on the right SERPs.
- Keyword
- A word or phrase people type - or say - when they search, used as the basic unit of demand in SEO. Keyword research maps which queries matter for a business, how often they are searched and how hard they are to win.
- Long-tail keyword
- A longer, more specific query with lower search volume but clearer intent and weaker competition - 'emergency plumber open sunday' versus 'plumber'. Long-tail terms usually convert better because the searcher already knows exactly what they want.
- Search intent
- The goal behind a query: informational (learn something), navigational (reach a specific site), commercial (compare options) or transactional (buy now). Matching a page's format and content to intent is one of the strongest levers in search.
- Organic traffic
- Visits that arrive from unpaid search results, as opposed to ads, social or direct visits. It is the compounding return on SEO work: a ranking keeps sending visitors without a per-click cost.
- Backlink
- A link from another website to yours. Search engines treat editorially earned backlinks as endorsements, which makes them a durable authority signal - while paid or manipulative links violate search-engine guidelines and can trigger penalties.
- Domain authority
- A third-party estimate - Moz's DA, Ahrefs' DR and similar - of how strong a site's link profile is, usually on a 0–100 scale. Useful for comparing sites at a glance, but it is not a metric Google itself uses.
- Crawling
- How search-engine and AI bots discover pages: following links, reading sitemaps and fetching content. If a page cannot be crawled it cannot be indexed or cited, which makes crawlability step zero of any visibility work.
- Indexing
- A search engine storing and organizing a crawled page so it can appear in results. Crawled does not mean indexed: engines skip pages they consider thin, duplicated or blocked - a noindex tag, for instance, keeps a page out on purpose.
- Canonical URL
- The 'official' URL a site declares for a piece of content when several URLs serve the same or near-identical page. The rel=canonical tag consolidates ranking signals onto one URL and prevents duplicate-content dilution.
- hreflang
- An annotation that tells search engines which language and region each version of a page targets, so searchers get the right locale in their results. Multilingual sites - this one serves 52 locales - use hreflang to stop language versions competing with each other.
- Structured data (schema.org)
- Machine-readable annotations, usually JSON-LD, that label what is on a page: a product, a review, an FAQ, a local business. Search engines use it to power rich results, and answer engines use it to extract facts reliably.
- Meta description
- The short page summary in HTML that search engines often display under the title in results. It is not a ranking factor, but it strongly influences click-through - it is effectively the page's ad copy on the SERP.
- Core Web Vitals
- Google's user-experience metrics for pages: LCP (loading speed), INP (responsiveness to interaction) and CLS (visual stability). They are measured on real visits and feed Google's page-experience signals.
- Local SEO
- Optimizing to appear for searches with local intent - 'near me' and city-level queries - centred on the Google Business Profile, consistent local citations, reviews and locally relevant content. See also: Manage Google Reviews
- Local pack
- The map block with a few business listings that Google shows for local-intent queries. Winning a spot depends on relevance, distance and prominence - with review count, rating and profile completeness playing a large role.
Reviews & Google Business Profile
- Google Business Profile (GBP)
- Google's free business listing - formerly Google My Business - that controls how a business appears on Maps and in local search: hours, photos, posts, Q&A and reviews. It is the foundation of local visibility. See also: Manage Google Reviews
- GBP post
- A short update published directly on a Google Business Profile - an offer, an event, a piece of news - that shows on the listing itself. Regular posting keeps a profile visibly active and gives searchers a current reason to choose you. See also: Manage Google Reviews
- Review velocity
- The rate at which a business earns new reviews over time. A steady stream signals an active, trusted business to both consumers and ranking systems, while a sudden unexplained spike can look manipulated. See also: Reviews & Reputation
- Review response rate
- The share of customer reviews a business replies to. Responses - especially to negative reviews - are read by every future customer browsing the profile, and they signal that someone is actually listening.
- Star rating
- The average of a business's review scores, usually on a one-to-five scale. Small differences matter disproportionately around common filter thresholds, and recent ratings typically weigh more with readers than old ones.
- Reputation management
- The ongoing practice of monitoring what is said about a brand across reviews, social media and search - and acting on it: responding, resolving issues and fixing root causes. Legitimate reputation work never fabricates sentiment. See also: Reviews & Reputation
- Review gating
- Screening customers by sentiment first and only asking the happy ones for a public review. It violates Google's review policies - and most other platforms' rules - and can get reviews filtered or a listing penalized. Ask everyone, uniformly, instead.
- NAP consistency
- Keeping a business's Name, Address and Phone number identical everywhere it appears - website, Google Business Profile, directories. Inconsistent NAP data fragments local ranking signals and erodes trust in the listing.
Outreach & email deliverability
- Cold outreach
- Contacting prospects who have no prior relationship with you, usually by email. Done well it is targeted, personalized, low-volume and easy to opt out of; done badly it is spam - and mailbox providers treat it accordingly. See also: Outreach
- ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
- A precise description of the company or person who gets the most value from your product: industry, size, role, geography, buying triggers. Prospect lists, messaging and qualification are all built against the ICP.
- Contact discovery
- Finding the right people to reach at target companies - names, roles and contact details - from public and licensed data sources. Quality beats volume: invalid addresses damage sender reputation with every send. See also: Contact Finder
- Lead enrichment
- Adding attributes to a contact or company record - size, industry, role, location - so you can segment, personalize and route leads properly. Enrichment turns a bare email address into a record you can act on. See also: Contact Finder
- Email deliverability
- The likelihood that your email lands in the inbox rather than the spam folder - or nowhere at all. It is driven by sender reputation, authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), list hygiene, sending patterns and recipient engagement. See also: Outreach
- SPF (Sender Policy Framework)
- A DNS record listing which servers are allowed to send email on behalf of your domain. Receiving servers check it to catch forged senders; it is one of the three standard email-authentication mechanisms, alongside DKIM and DMARC.
- DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail)
- A cryptographic signature added to outgoing email that lets receiving servers verify the message really comes from your domain and was not altered in transit. A practical prerequisite for deliverability at any meaningful volume.
- DMARC
- A DNS policy that tells receiving servers what to do with mail that fails SPF or DKIM alignment - deliver, quarantine or reject - and where to send reports. Major mailbox providers require it for bulk senders.
- Email warm-up
- Gradually increasing sending volume from a new domain or mailbox so providers learn it is a legitimate sender. Jumping straight to high volume from a cold domain is one of the fastest routes to the spam folder.
- Bounce rate (email)
- The share of sent emails that could not be delivered: hard bounces (the address does not exist) and soft bounces (temporary failures). A high bounce rate signals a stale or scraped list and quickly damages sender reputation.
- Open rate
- The share of delivered emails that were opened. Useful as a trend, but privacy features - Apple Mail's pre-fetching, for example - inflate it, so treat open rate as directional rather than exact.
- Spam trap
- An email address that exists only to catch senders with bad list practices: it never opted in to anything, so any mail it receives proves the list was not cleanly built. Hitting spam traps can get a sender blocklisted.
- Unsubscribe rate
- The share of recipients who opt out after a send. A small, steady rate is normal list hygiene; spikes flag mistargeted content - and hiding the unsubscribe link is both illegal in most jurisdictions and disastrous for deliverability.
Campaigns, creative & analytics
- CTA (Call to action)
- The specific next step a piece of marketing asks for: book a demo, start a trial, get directions. One clear CTA per asset almost always outperforms several competing ones.
- A/B testing
- Showing two variants of an asset - subject line, page, creative - to comparable audiences and measuring which performs better. Valid tests change one variable at a time and run long enough to reach statistical significance.
- Conversion rate
- The share of visitors or recipients who complete the desired action: sign up, book, buy. Define the denominator per channel and funnel stage, or the numbers stop being comparable.
- CTR (Click-through rate)
- Clicks divided by impressions - or, for email, clicks divided by delivered messages. CTR measures how compelling the message was to the audience that actually saw it; it is the first honest engagement signal in most funnels.
- UTM parameters
- Tags appended to URLs - utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign and friends - so analytics tools can attribute a visit to the campaign that caused it. Consistent UTM conventions are the difference between attribution and guesswork.
- Brand kit
- The reusable definition of a brand's identity: logo, colors, fonts, tone of voice. It keeps every designed or AI-generated asset consistent - creative tools use the brand kit as a constraint when producing content. See also: Creative Studio
- Content calendar
- A schedule of what will be published, where and when, across channels. It turns publishing from ad-hoc bursts into a steady cadence - which is what both algorithms and audiences reward. See also: Campaign Architect
APIs & credits
- API (Application Programming Interface)
- A programmatic interface that lets software call another system's capabilities directly, without a user interface. AI92 exposes its marketing modules through a REST API documented in the developer hub. See also: Developer hub
- API key
- A secret token that identifies and authenticates whoever is calling an API. Treat keys like passwords: keep them server-side, never ship them in client code or repositories, and rotate any key that may have been exposed. See also: Authentication docs
- Bearer token
- An HTTP authentication scheme where the caller sends 'Authorization: Bearer <token>' with each request. Bearer means possession is proof - anyone holding the token can use it - so tokens must only ever travel over HTTPS. See also: Authentication docs
- Sandbox key
- An API key scoped to a test environment: requests behave like production but touch no real data, budgets or third-party services. Build and test integrations on sandbox keys, then switch to live keys for launch. See also: Sandbox docs
- Credit metering
- A usage-billing model where each API action debits a defined number of credits from a balance. Metering makes the cost of every action explicit up front and allows spend to be capped per key, feature or period. See also: Credits & metering docs
- Pay-as-you-go
- Paying for actual usage instead of a fixed subscription - for example, buying credit packs that API calls consume. It suits spiky or exploratory workloads; spend caps and auto-recharge rules keep it predictable. See also: API pricing
- Rate limiting
- A cap on how many requests a client may make in a given time window, protecting the platform and enforcing fair use. Well-behaved clients read the rate-limit response headers and slow down before hitting a 429 error. See also: Rate limits docs
- Webhook
- A callback the platform sends to your server when something happens - a job finishes, a contact is verified - so you do not have to poll for updates. Endpoints should verify the signature, respond quickly and tolerate the occasional duplicate delivery. See also: Webhooks docs
- Idempotency
- The property that repeating the same request has the same effect as making it once. APIs implement it with idempotency keys, letting clients retry safely after a timeout without double-charging or duplicating work. See also: Idempotency docs
- OpenAPI specification
- A machine-readable description of a REST API: endpoints, parameters, schemas, authentication. It powers generated documentation, client SDKs and tests - AI92's public API reference and pricing tables are generated from its live spec. See also: API reference