24 terms that come up in web, SEO, marketing and AI work, defined without the mystique that usually gets charged for.
Mizen Studio publishes a plain-English glossary of 24 web, SEO, marketing and AI terms used in client work, from Core Web Vitals and the local pack to GEO, AEO, llms.txt and retrieval-augmented generation. Each entry says what the term means and, where the industry does not agree on it, says that too.
Also called: AEO
The work of structuring a page so an answer engine can extract a direct answer from it: the answer stated plainly near the top, questions marked up as FAQ or Q&A, and claims attributable to a source. It overlaps heavily with GEO, and the two labels are often used interchangeably. Where people distinguish them, AEO is about being extractable and GEO is about being chosen.
Also called: GEO
The work of becoming a source an AI assistant cites when it writes an answer, rather than a result in a list of links. It depends on being crawlable, being clearly structured, and publishing something distinctive enough to be worth quoting. The term is new and its boundaries are not settled.
A plain-text file at the root of a site that summarises what the site is and points to its most useful pages and data, written for large language models rather than crawlers. It is an emerging convention, not a standard, and no major assistant is documented as requiring it. It is cheap to publish and currently a differentiator.
A file at the root of a site telling crawlers which paths they may fetch, and optionally how fast. Compliance is voluntary and honoured by the major crawlers. A common and invisible failure is a host injecting its own directives, so the file served does not match the file uploaded.
Also called: Schema markup, JSON-LD
Machine-readable facts embedded in a page using the schema.org vocabulary, usually as JSON-LD in a script tag. It does not change what a visitor sees. It tells a search or answer engine what the page is about, who published it, and which parts are a question, a price, an article or an organisation.
Also called: Map pack, Local three-pack
The block of three local businesses, shown with a map, that Google places above the ordinary results for a search with local intent. Appearing in it is driven mostly by proximity, relevance and prominence, and a complete Google Business Profile with genuine reviews is the largest controllable factor.
Also called: GBP, Google My Business
The free business listing that feeds Google Maps and the local pack. For a business serving customers in a specific place it is usually the highest-return thing to get right, and it is frequently left half-complete: no categories, no hours, no photographs, no replies to reviews.
Also called: CWV
Google's three measured aspects of page experience: Largest Contentful Paint (loading), Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness) and Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability). They are a ranking input and, more usefully, a direct measure of whether a page feels slow.
Also called: LCP
How long until the largest visible element in the viewport has rendered. Google treats under 2.5 seconds as good. On most small-business sites the culprit is an unoptimised hero image or a blocking web font.
Also called: CMS
The part of a website that lets someone who is not a developer change the content. The practical test of one is not its feature list but whether the client actually uses it a month after launch without ringing anybody.
A content management system that stores and serves content through an API, with the front end built separately rather than rendered by the CMS itself. It buys flexibility and performance at the cost of more moving parts, and it is overkill for most brochure sites.
Also called: Static site generator
A site served as pre-built HTML files rather than assembled by a server on each request. It is fast, cheap to host and has almost no attack surface, and it needs a build step to publish changes. This site is one.
Also called: Canonical tag
A declaration of the preferred address for a page, used when the same content is reachable at more than one URL. Without it, search engines choose for you and the ranking signals split between the versions.
Also called: CVR
The share of visitors who do the thing the page exists for: an enquiry, a booking, a call, a purchase. It matters more than traffic, because doubling it costs nothing in media spend and improves every channel at once.
Also called: CRO
The practice of improving the share of visitors who take the desired action, by changing the page rather than buying more traffic. On a small-business site the wins are usually unglamorous: a visible phone number, fewer form fields, and a clear next step above the fold.
Working out which marketing activity produced an enquiry or a sale. Perfect attribution is not achievable and has not been for years. Useful attribution is: you can tell which channels produce enquiries and which only produce traffic.
Also called: Google Consent Mode v2
Google's mechanism for adjusting how its tags behave according to a visitor's consent choices. In the EU it is effectively mandatory for advertising features, and it must default to denied before a choice is made, or the data is both legally exposed and wrong.
Also called: Fractional CMO, Fractional marketing lead
A senior marketing leader engaged part-time, typically a few days a month, to set strategy, pick and manage vendors and hold delivery to a standard. It suits an organisation that needs judgement rather than execution and cannot yet justify a full-time salary.
Fractional marketing director · Fractional vs agency vs hire
Also called: Website maintenance, Retainer
An ongoing arrangement covering hosting, updates, backups, security patching, monitoring and a small allowance of content changes. It is not the same as a marketing retainer, and conflating the two is how businesses end up paying for maintenance and believing they are paying for growth.
The paid, structured work at the start of a project that establishes what is actually being built and why, before design begins. Skipping it does not save money; it moves the cost to the point where changes are most expensive.
Also called: Workflow automation
Replacing manual, repetitive, rule-based steps in a business process with software. The gain is hours returned, not headcount removed, and the first job is deciding which processes deserve it. Sometimes the correct answer is to simplify the process instead.
Also called: RAG
A pattern where a language model is given relevant documents fetched at query time and answers from them, rather than from training alone. It is how most useful internal AI assistants are built, because it lets the answer cite a source the business controls.
Also called: Entity SEO
In search, a thing a knowledge graph can identify and hold facts about: a business, a person, a place, a product. Being treated as an entity rather than a set of pages depends on naming yourself consistently everywhere and linking your profiles to each other.
Also called: EEAT
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust: the qualities Google's human quality raters are asked to assess. It is not a score in the algorithm. It is a description of what the algorithm is trying to approximate, which makes it a reasonable checklist.
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