Glossary
30 terms, in plain words.
Search, AI visibility and store economics, each with its own link you can share.
- AEO (answer engine optimization)#
- Work that helps a page become the direct answer an engine gives, in featured snippets, voice assistants or AI chat answers. It favors clear questions, short direct answers and structured data.
- GEO (generative engine optimization)#
- Work that makes a brand more likely to be found, cited and recommended inside answers written by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. See the GEO guide.
- AI crawler#
- A bot that reads public web pages for an AI company, either to train models (like GPTBot or ClaudeBot) or to find pages to cite in answers (like OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot). Your robots.txt decides which ones may read your site. Check yours.
- llms.txt#
- A proposed plain-text file at the root of a site (yoursite.com/llms.txt) that lists the most useful pages for AI tools, with a short summary of the site. It is still a proposal, and not every AI company reads it. Draft one.
- Schema markup#
- Labels from the schema.org vocabulary that tell machines what a page holds: a product, its price, its brand, a business, an article. Search engines use it for rich results and AI tools use it to read facts reliably.
- JSON-LD#
- The format Google recommends for schema markup: a script tag holding the facts as JSON, separate from the visible page. See what your page has.
- Canonical tag#
- A link tag that names the main address of a page when the same content is reachable at several addresses, such as a product under two collections. It keeps search engines from splitting signals across copies.
- hreflang#
- Tags that link the language versions of a page, such as English and Hebrew, so search engines show each shopper the version in their language.
- Core Web Vitals#
- Google's three measures of page experience: how fast the main content appears (LCP), how stable the layout is (CLS) and how quickly the page responds to a tap or click (INP).
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)#
- The time until the largest image or text block in view has loaded. Google treats 2.5 seconds or less as good. On stores it is often the hero image or the main product photo.
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)#
- How much the page jumps while it loads, for example when a banner pushes the buy button down. Google treats 0.1 or less as good.
- INP (Interaction to Next Paint)#
- How long the page takes to respond visibly after a tap, click or key press. Google treats 200 milliseconds or less as good. Heavy scripts and apps are the usual cause of slow INP.
- Meta description#
- The short summary in the page head that search engines often show under the title. It does not move rankings directly, but it decides whether people click. Around 70 to 160 characters fits most results. Check yours.
- Title tag#
- The page title shown in browser tabs and as the blue headline in search results. Keep it near 60 characters so it is not cut, and put what the page offers first.
- Alt text#
- A short text description of an image, read by screen readers and used by search engines and AI tools to understand the picture. Every product photo should have one that names the product.
- Sitemap#
- An XML file, usually at /sitemap.xml, that lists the pages a site wants search engines to find. Shopify and most platforms create one automatically.
- robots.txt#
- A text file at the root of a site that tells crawlers which parts they may read. It is how a site allows or blocks AI crawlers. It is a request that crawlers choose to honor.
- ROAS (return on ad spend)#
- Revenue from ads divided by what the ads cost. A ROAS of 4 means 4 in sales for every 1 spent. It ignores product cost, so a high ROAS can still lose money.
- POAS (profit on ad spend)#
- Gross profit from ad-driven sales divided by ad cost. Above 1 means the ads paid for themselves after product costs. It needs your product costs to calculate.
- Contribution margin#
- What is left from a sale after the costs that come with that sale: product cost, shipping, payment fees and ad spend. It shows which products actually fund the business.
- AOV (average order value)#
- Revenue divided by the number of orders over the same period. Bundles, free-shipping thresholds and cross-sells are the usual ways to raise it.
- LTV (customer lifetime value)#
- The total a customer spends with you over the whole relationship, ideally counted as profit. Comparing it with CAC tells you how much you can afford to pay for a new customer.
- CAC (customer acquisition cost)#
- What it costs to win one new customer: marketing and sales spend over a period divided by new customers in that period.
- Churn#
- The share of customers or subscribers who stop buying in a period. For stores without subscriptions it is usually read as customers who have not reordered within their normal buying cycle.
- Repeat purchase rate#
- The share of customers who ordered more than once in a period. It is one of the clearest signs of product fit and of how well email and retention work.
- Conversion rate#
- Orders divided by sessions (or visitors) over the same period. Read it per traffic source and per device; one blended number hides where the problem is.
- How much of the visible conversation in a category belongs to your brand compared with competitors: in search results, in ads, on social or in AI answers.
- Structured data#
- Any information on a page written in a fixed, machine-readable format, most often schema.org markup in JSON-LD. It is what lets an engine read a price or a rating as a fact.
- AI Overviews#
- The AI-written summaries Google shows above some search results, with links to the sources it drew on. Being one of those sources is a GEO goal.
- Zero-click search#
- A search that ends on the results page because the answer is already there, in a snippet, a map or an AI summary. It is why being named in the answer matters as much as ranking.