Glossary

The vocabulary this site uses precisely. Terms link to the systems that use them; jargon without a working definition does not appear here or anywhere else on the site.

reviewed 2026-07-14
AEO (answer engine optimization)
Work that makes content more likely to be retrieved, interpreted correctly and cited by answer engines. The work is structural: answers, evidence, entities and dates, which is a wider job than chasing rankings.
reviewed 2026-07-14
Agent-ready website
A website whose structure, labels, states and actions are legible and completable by software acting on a person's behalf, achieved through the same qualities that make it accessible to people.
reviewed 2026-07-14
Answer engine
A system that composes a direct response to a question from retrieved and interpreted sources, rather than returning a ranked list of links.
reviewed 2026-07-14
Answer-engine visibility
The observable presence of a business in machine-composed answers: citations, mentions and links inside AI Overviews, assistant responses and similar surfaces.
reviewed 2026-07-14
Brand evidence
The consistent, verifiable body of material that lets a person or machine understand and trust a business: definitions, people, credentials, claims with proof, reviews, references, original research.
reviewed 2026-07-14
Claims ledger
A maintained register of the claims a business makes publicly, each with its type, supporting evidence, sources, confidence and checked date.
reviewed 2026-07-14
Entity
A distinct, identifiable thing (an organization, person, service, place or concept) that search and answer systems try to recognize and connect across sources.
reviewed 2026-07-14
Intent taxonomy
A working map from real customer questions to the pages, ads, evidence and actions that should answer them, organized by what the asker is trying to do.
reviewed 2026-07-14
llms.txt
A proposed convention (Answer.AI, September 2024) for a markdown file at /llms.txt listing a site's key content for language models; no major AI platform has confirmed consuming it.
reviewed 2026-07-14
Offline conversion import
Returning conversions that complete outside the website (qualified opportunities, consultations, revenue) to an ad platform, matched by click identifier or hashed customer data.
reviewed 2026-07-14
Query fan-out
The expansion of one user question into many related sub-queries by a search or answer system, which then retrieves against that whole expanded set, reaching well past the literal words typed.
reviewed 2026-07-14
Signal quality
How accurately and completely the events returned to an optimizing system represent the outcomes the business actually values.