Glossary

A revenue model where content publishers earn commission on sales generated through tracked links to vendor products.

A synthetic, AI-generated digital human used to deliver pre-scripted video content with realistic facial expressions, lip-sync and voice.

The synchronization of an AI avatar's mouth and facial movements with generated or input speech audio.

The practice of optimizing content to be cited as a source in AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews and other answer engines.

Short, self-contained factual statements (typically 6-20 words) that LLMs prefer to cite verbatim in AI-generated answers.

Google's quality framework for evaluating content, expanded to four factors in late 2022 — used by both Google ranking algorithms and AI search engines.

Synonym for AEO: optimizing content to appear as a citation in AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overviews.

An open protocol that lets websites notify search engines (Bing, Yandex, Naver) instantly when content is added, updated or deleted — bypassing crawl wait times.

JSON for Linking Data — the standard format for embedding Schema.org structured data in web pages, recommended by Google over microdata or RDFa.

An information box that appears on Google search results pages summarizing key facts about a person, place, organization or thing, sourced from Google's Knowledge Graph.

A standardized markdown file at the root of a website that summarizes the site's content for LLM crawlers in a format optimized for AI consumption.

The practice of generating large numbers of similar SEO-optimized pages from a template plus a structured dataset.

Structured data added to web pages using the Schema.org vocabulary to help search engines and LLMs understand content semantics.

A Schema.org markup that tells voice assistants (Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri) which sections of a web page are suitable for being read aloud.

A statistical technique that pulls low-volume review averages toward a neutral prior, preventing high-variance ratings from low sample sizes from distorting overall scores.

A consumer review platform aggregating user ratings (1-5 stars) and written reviews of businesses across industries, widely used as a sentiment signal.

Synthetic media (video, audio or images) of a real person, generated by AI without their consent, typically to deceive viewers.

A neural network trained on massive text datasets that can understand and generate human-like text, used in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity.

An AI architecture that retrieves relevant documents from a knowledge base and feeds them to an LLM as context to ground its generated answer in factual sources.

An XML-based markup language for fine-grained control of TTS output — pauses, emphasis, pitch, rate and phoneme pronunciation.

AI technology that converts written text into spoken audio, with control over voice, pace, emphasis and emotion.

The process of training an AI model on samples of a target voice (30 seconds to several hours) to generate new speech in that voice from any text input.