The words agencies hide behind.
Every term a marketing company will use to sound technical, defined in plain English. No fluff, no upsell baked into the definition. An owner who understands the work gets better work.
Local SEO
Map Pack
The Map Pack is the boxed group of three local businesses Google shows at the top of search results, above the regular links, with a map and pins.
Read the definitionGoogle Business Profile
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.
Read the definitionNAP
NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone number, the core business details that must be identical everywhere they appear online for local search to trust you.
Read the definitionLocal Citation
A local citation is any online mention of your business’s name, address, and phone number, on a directory, review site, or listing, whether or not it links to you.
Read the definitionService-Area Business (SAB)
A service-area business is one that travels to its customers, like a plumber or landscaper, and its Google profile shows the towns it serves instead of a street address.
Read the definitionReview Gating
Review gating is pre-screening customers and only asking the happy ones for a public review, a practice Google’s policies explicitly prohibit and can penalize.
Read the definitionGoogle Posts
Google Posts are the short updates, offers, and events a business publishes directly to its Google Business Profile, appearing on the listing itself where searchers actually look.
Read the definitionLocal Justifications
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.
Read the definitionReview Velocity
Review velocity is the pace and consistency at which a business earns new reviews over time, which Google and customers now weigh alongside the star rating and the total count.
Read the definitionLocal Services Ads
Local Services Ads are Google’s pay-per-lead ads for local trades and pros that sit above the map pack, carry a “Google Guaranteed” or “Google Screened” badge, and charge per contact instead of per click.
Read the definitionProximity
Proximity is how close a business is to the person searching, one of the three main factors Google uses to build the map pack, and the reason your ranking changes as customers move around town.
Read the definitionAI Search
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
GEO is the practice of getting your business named inside the answers AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI give, instead of buried in a list of links.
Read the definitionAI Overviews
AI Overviews are the AI-written summaries Google now places at the very top of many search results, answering the question directly and citing a few sources above the usual blue links.
Read the definitionAnswer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of structuring your content so AI answer engines can lift a clean, correct answer straight from your page and credit you as the source.
Read the definitionAI Citation
An AI citation is when an assistant like ChatGPT or Perplexity names your business or links your page as a source in its answer, the AI-era equivalent of ranking on page one.
Read the definitionEntity SEO
An entity is a specific real-world thing, your business, its owner, its location, that search and AI systems track as a distinct “who,” and entity SEO is making sure they understand exactly who you are.
Read the definitionKnowledge Panel
A knowledge panel is the information box Google shows about a recognized business, person, or thing, pulled from its Knowledge Graph, and earning one signals that Google sees you as a real, distinct entity.
Read the definitionZero-Click Search
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.
Read the definitionAI Hallucination
An AI hallucination is when an assistant states something false with full confidence, like inventing your hours or address, which is exactly why feeding it accurate, structured information about your business matters.
Read the definitionGrounding
Grounding is when an AI assistant answers from real sources it just retrieved, like your live web page, instead of only its training memory, and grounded answers are where citations come from.
Read the definitionConversational Query
A conversational query is a full-sentence, natural question people ask an AI tool, longer and far more specific than the clipped keywords they would type into Google.
Read the definitionTechnical SEO
Schema Markup
Schema markup is invisible code added to a web page that tells search engines and AI exactly what your content is: a business, a service, a review, an FAQ, in a language they read perfectly.
Read the definitionCore Web Vitals
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.
Read the definitionllms.txt
llms.txt is a plain-text file you place at your domain’s root that gives AI models a clean, curated map of your most important pages, in the same spirit that robots.txt and sitemaps guide search crawlers.
Read the definitionAI Crawler
AI crawlers are the bots AI companies use to read your website so their assistants can reference it, GPTBot for ChatGPT, ClaudeBot for Claude, PerplexityBot for Perplexity, and if you block them, you cannot be cited.
Read the definitionSEO
Backlink
A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Search engines treat each one as a vote of confidence, and links from trusted, relevant sites carry the most weight.
Read the definitionE-E-A-T
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, the four qualities Google’s guidelines use to judge whether content, and the business behind it, deserves to rank and be cited.
Read the definitionFeatured Snippet
A featured snippet is the boxed answer Google lifts from a web page and shows at the very top of results, quoting the page directly and linking it as the source.
Read the definitionDoorway Page
A doorway page is a thin, near-duplicate page created only to catch a search term, like the same paragraph repeated for thirty towns, a pattern Google treats as spam.
Read the definitionHit a term we haven’t defined? It’s a free phone call away, and we’ll probably add it.