Marketing glossary

The Map Pack is a group of local business results Google may show with a map for a search that has local intent. Its size and position can vary.

A Google Business Profile is the free business listing that powers how you appear on Google Maps and in the local Map Pack, separate from your website.

NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone number, the core contact facts that should stay accurate across a business’s important profiles and directories.

A local citation is an online mention or listing of a local business, often including its name, address, phone number, or website.

A service-area business visits or delivers to customers and does not serve them at its address, so its Google Business Profile should hide that address and list an accurate service area.

Review gating is pre-screening customers and only asking the happy ones for a public review, a practice Google’s policies prohibit.

Google Posts are short updates, offers, and events a business publishes through its Google Business Profile that may appear in Search and Maps.

Local justifications are the extra one-line snippets Google attaches to map-pack results, like “Provides: drain cleaning” or a quoted review, explaining why this business matches your search.

Review velocity describes how a business’s reviews accumulate over time, including their pace and recency.

Local Services Ads are Google ads for eligible local service categories that can appear prominently in Search and charge for valid leads rather than ordinary clicks.

Proximity is the distance between a business and the searcher or place named in the query, one of Google’s main factors for local results.

GEO is the practice of making a business and its information easier for AI search tools to find, understand, and cite when they answer relevant questions.

AI Overviews are AI-generated snapshots Google may show when its systems determine that a summary could be helpful, with links to supporting web information.

Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of making a page’s answers clear, self-contained, and easy for search and AI systems to interpret.

An AI citation is when an assistant like ChatGPT or Perplexity presents your page as a source in an answer. The source should still be checked, and the citation is not a permanent rank or a guarantee that the same prompt will cite it again.

Entity SEO is the practice of making the relationships among a business, its people, locations, services, and public sources clear and consistent.

A knowledge panel is an information box Google generates automatically from its Knowledge Graph and web sources for some people, places, organizations, and things.

A zero-click search is one where the user gets their answer right on the results page, from an AI Overview, Map Pack, or snippet, and never clicks through to any website.

An AI hallucination is unsupported or incorrect model output that may still sound fluent and confident.

Grounding is the use of retrieved sources or supplied data to support an AI answer instead of relying only on the model’s stored training knowledge.

A conversational query is a natural-language request, often with more context than a short keyword query.

Schema markup is machine-readable code that labels a page and its contents, such as a business, service, product, article, person, or event.

Core Web Vitals are Google’s measurements of how fast and stable a page feels to a real visitor: how quickly it loads, how soon it responds, and whether it jumps around while loading.

llms.txt is a proposed plain-text convention for listing a site’s important pages in a compact format that an AI tool may choose to read.

AI companies use different automated agents for model training, search indexing, and user-requested page visits, and each agent can have a different access control.

A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Search engines can use links to discover pages and understand which content may be useful or relevant.

E-E-A-T is a framework in Google’s quality-rater guidance for assessing experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust.

A featured snippet is a prominent Google result that displays an excerpt, list, or table from a page and links to the source.

A doorway page is created primarily to rank for similar queries and funnel people toward another destination, a pattern Google treats as spam.