{
 "publisher": "Mention Group",
 "updated": "2026-11-05",
 "terms": [
  {
   "term": "301 Redirect",
   "definition": "A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect that sends visitors and search engines from an old URL to a new one, passing along most of the old page's ranking signals.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#301-redirect"
  },
  {
   "term": "Accessibility Overlay",
   "definition": "An accessibility overlay is a third-party script or widget added to a website that claims to automatically detect and fix accessibility problems.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#accessibility-overlay"
  },
  {
   "term": "ADA Title II Web Rule",
   "definition": "The ADA Title II web rule is a Department of Justice regulation requiring state and local governments' websites and mobile apps to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#ada-title-ii"
  },
  {
   "term": "Agent Experience Optimization (AXO)",
   "definition": "Agent experience optimization is making a website easy for AI agents to read, understand and act on, through clean structure, agent-friendly content formats and clear task-specific definitions.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#axo"
  },
  {
   "term": "AI Agent",
   "definition": "An AI agent is software that acts on a person's behalf, such as browsing websites, comparing options, filling forms, booking appointments or making purchases, rather than only answering questions.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#ai-agent"
  },
  {
   "term": "AI Crawler",
   "definition": "An AI crawler is a bot run by an AI company that fetches web pages to train models, power AI search answers, or retrieve a page a user requested.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#ai-crawler"
  },
  {
   "term": "AI Hallucination",
   "definition": "An AI hallucination is when an assistant states something false or invented with confidence, such as wrong hours, a fake service or a review that does not exist.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#hallucination"
  },
  {
   "term": "AI Referral Traffic",
   "definition": "AI referral traffic is website visits that come from people clicking links inside AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Claude.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#ai-referral-traffic"
  },
  {
   "term": "AI Share of Voice",
   "definition": "AI share of voice is the percentage of relevant AI answers that name your brand compared with competitors, measured across a defined set of buyer prompts and assistants.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#ai-share-of-voice"
  },
  {
   "term": "Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)",
   "definition": "Answer engine optimization is structuring content so search engines and AI assistants can lift it as a direct answer to a specific question, rather than just listing a link.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#aeo"
  },
  {
   "term": "Apple Business Connect",
   "definition": "Apple Business Connect is Apple's free tool for businesses to claim and manage how they appear in Apple Maps, Siri, Wallet and other Apple apps.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#apple-business-connect"
  },
  {
   "term": "Backlink",
   "definition": "A backlink is a link from another website to yours, which search engines treat as a signal of relevance and trust, especially when it comes from a respected, related site.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#backlink"
  },
  {
   "term": "Bing Webmaster Tools",
   "definition": "Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft's free dashboard for site owners to see how Bing crawls, indexes and ranks their site, submit sitemaps and diagnose problems.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#bing-webmaster-tools"
  },
  {
   "term": "Branded Search",
   "definition": "Branded search is when people search for your business by name, alone or with words like reviews, hours or pricing, rather than for a generic product or service.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#brand-search"
  },
  {
   "term": "Canonical Tag",
   "definition": "A canonical tag is a line of HTML telling search engines which URL is the preferred version when the same or similar content exists at several URLs.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#canonical"
  },
  {
   "term": "Citation",
   "definition": "Citation has two meanings: in local SEO, any online mention of a business's name, address and phone; in AI search, a source an AI answer links to or credits.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#citation"
  },
  {
   "term": "Conversion Tracking",
   "definition": "Conversion tracking is measuring the valuable actions people take after interacting with marketing, such as purchases, calls, form fills or bookings, and attributing them to sources.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#conversion-tracking"
  },
  {
   "term": "Core Web Vitals",
   "definition": "Core Web Vitals are Google's three user experience metrics: Largest Contentful Paint for loading, Interaction to Next Paint for responsiveness, and Cumulative Layout Shift for visual stability.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#core-web-vitals"
  },
  {
   "term": "CPA (Cost per Acquisition)",
   "definition": "CPA, or cost per acquisition, is the ad or marketing spend required to win one customer or complete one target action, such as a purchase or signed contract.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#cpa"
  },
  {
   "term": "CPC (Cost per Click)",
   "definition": "CPC, or cost per click, is the amount an advertiser pays each time someone clicks an ad, set through an auction on platforms like Google Ads and Microsoft Ads.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#cpc"
  },
  {
   "term": "CPL (Cost per Lead)",
   "definition": "CPL, or cost per lead, is total marketing or ad spend divided by the number of leads generated, such as form fills, calls or booked consultations.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#cpl"
  },
  {
   "term": "Crawl Budget",
   "definition": "Crawl budget is how many pages a search engine will crawl on a site in a given period, based on server capacity and how valuable the pages seem.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#crawl-budget"
  },
  {
   "term": "CTR (Click-Through Rate)",
   "definition": "CTR, or click-through rate, is the percentage of people who click a link or ad after seeing it, calculated as clicks divided by impressions.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#ctr"
  },
  {
   "term": "CTV (Connected TV)",
   "definition": "CTV, or connected TV, advertising is video ads shown on internet-connected televisions through streaming apps and devices, bought digitally rather than through traditional TV networks.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#ctv"
  },
  {
   "term": "E-E-A-T",
   "definition": "E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, the qualities Google's quality rater guidelines use to judge whether content and its creators are credible.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#eeat"
  },
  {
   "term": "Entity",
   "definition": "In search and AI, an entity is a distinct, identifiable thing, such as a business, person, place or product, that systems recognize and connect to facts and other entities.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#entity"
  },
  {
   "term": "Fake Reviews",
   "definition": "Fake reviews are reviews that misrepresent who wrote them or their experience, including bought, AI-generated, employee-written or incentivized reviews that hide the incentive.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#fake-reviews"
  },
  {
   "term": "Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)",
   "definition": "Generative engine optimization is the practice of making a business easy for AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity to find, understand, trust and recommend in their answers.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#geo"
  },
  {
   "term": "Google AI Mode",
   "definition": "Google AI Mode is a conversational search experience within Google that answers complex questions with an AI-generated response, follow-up questions and links, using Gemini models.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#ai-mode"
  },
  {
   "term": "Google AI Overviews",
   "definition": "Google AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of some Google search results, answering the query and linking to the sources used.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#ai-overviews"
  },
  {
   "term": "Google Analytics 4 (GA4)",
   "definition": "Google Analytics 4 is Google's current web and app analytics platform, built around events rather than sessions, and it replaced Universal Analytics in 2023.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#ga4"
  },
  {
   "term": "Google Business Profile",
   "definition": "Google Business Profile is Google's free listing for a business, controlling how it appears in Google Maps and local search with details like hours, photos, reviews and services.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#google-business-profile"
  },
  {
   "term": "Google Consent Mode",
   "definition": "Google Consent Mode is a framework that passes a visitor's cookie consent choices to Google tags so measurement and ads adjust to what the visitor allowed.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#consent-mode"
  },
  {
   "term": "Google Search Console",
   "definition": "Google Search Console is Google's free tool that shows how a site performs in Google Search, including queries, clicks, indexing status and technical issues.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#google-search-console"
  },
  {
   "term": "Google-Extended",
   "definition": "Google-Extended is a robots.txt token that lets site owners control whether Google may use their content to train and ground Gemini models, separate from regular Google Search crawling.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#google-extended"
  },
  {
   "term": "GPTBot",
   "definition": "GPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler that collects publicly available content that may be used to train OpenAI's generative AI models, and it respects robots.txt.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#gptbot"
  },
  {
   "term": "Grounding",
   "definition": "Grounding is connecting an AI model's answer to specific, verifiable sources, such as live search results or documents, so the response reflects real facts rather than memory alone.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#grounding"
  },
  {
   "term": "IndexNow",
   "definition": "IndexNow is an open protocol that lets a website instantly notify participating search engines, including Bing, Yandex, Naver and Seznam, when pages are added, updated or deleted.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#indexnow"
  },
  {
   "term": "Internal Link",
   "definition": "An internal link is a link from one page on your website to another page on the same site, helping visitors and search engines navigate and understand how pages relate.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#internal-link"
  },
  {
   "term": "JSON-LD",
   "definition": "JSON-LD is the format Google recommends for adding schema markup, placing structured data in a script block on the page instead of weaving it into the visible HTML.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#json-ld"
  },
  {
   "term": "Knowledge Graph",
   "definition": "A knowledge graph is a database of entities and the relationships between them, which Google and other systems use to answer factual questions and display information panels.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#knowledge-graph"
  },
  {
   "term": "Landing Page",
   "definition": "A landing page is the page a visitor arrives on from an ad, email or link, ideally built around one offer and one clear next step.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#landing-page"
  },
  {
   "term": "Large Language Model (LLM)",
   "definition": "A large language model is an AI system trained on huge amounts of text to predict and generate language, and it powers assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Copilot.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#llm"
  },
  {
   "term": "llms.txt",
   "definition": "llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file at a website's root that gives AI systems a short, curated map of the site's most important pages and what they cover.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#llms-txt"
  },
  {
   "term": "Local Pack",
   "definition": "The local pack is the block of map results, usually three businesses, that Google shows for searches with local intent such as \"plumber near me\" or \"coffee shop downtown.\"",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#local-pack"
  },
  {
   "term": "Mention Score",
   "definition": "The Mention Score is Mention Group's metric, published in the AI Mention Report, measuring how often and how accurately AI answers name a brand for its buyers' questions.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#mention-score"
  },
  {
   "term": "Meta Description",
   "definition": "A meta description is a short HTML summary of a page that search engines may show beneath the title in results, though they often write their own.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#meta-description"
  },
  {
   "term": "Microsoft Clarity",
   "definition": "Microsoft Clarity is a free behavior analytics tool that records anonymized session replays and heatmaps showing how visitors scroll, click and get stuck on a website.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#microsoft-clarity"
  },
  {
   "term": "NAP (Name, Address, Phone)",
   "definition": "NAP stands for name, address and phone number, the core business details that should be identical everywhere your business is listed online.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#nap"
  },
  {
   "term": "OAI-SearchBot",
   "definition": "OAI-SearchBot is the OpenAI crawler used to find and surface websites in ChatGPT's search features, and sites that block it in robots.txt can be left out of those answers.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#oai-searchbot"
  },
  {
   "term": "Performance Max",
   "definition": "Performance Max is a Google Ads campaign type that uses automation to place ads across Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps from a single campaign.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#performance-max"
  },
  {
   "term": "PerplexityBot",
   "definition": "PerplexityBot is the crawler Perplexity uses to discover and index web pages so they can be surfaced and linked as sources in Perplexity's answers.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#perplexitybot"
  },
  {
   "term": "Programmatic Advertising",
   "definition": "Programmatic advertising is buying digital ad space automatically through software and real-time auctions, targeting audiences across many websites, apps and streaming services.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#programmatic"
  },
  {
   "term": "Quality Score",
   "definition": "Quality Score is Google Ads' 1 to 10 diagnostic rating of a keyword, based on expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#quality-score"
  },
  {
   "term": "Query Fan-Out",
   "definition": "Query fan-out is when an AI search system splits one question into many related sub-queries, searches each, and combines the results into a single answer.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#query-fan-out"
  },
  {
   "term": "Reputation Management",
   "definition": "Reputation management is monitoring and shaping what customers, search results and AI assistants say about a business, by earning reviews, responding to feedback and correcting errors.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#reputation-management"
  },
  {
   "term": "Retargeting",
   "definition": "Retargeting is showing ads to people who have already visited your website, used your app or engaged with your content, to bring them back to complete an action.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#retargeting"
  },
  {
   "term": "Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)",
   "definition": "Retrieval-augmented generation is a technique where an AI system first retrieves relevant documents, often from search or a database, then uses them to write its answer.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#rag"
  },
  {
   "term": "ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)",
   "definition": "ROAS, or return on ad spend, is the revenue attributed to advertising divided by what was spent on that advertising, often written as a ratio like 4:1.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#roas"
  },
  {
   "term": "robots.txt",
   "definition": "robots.txt is a text file at a website's root that tells crawlers which parts of the site they may or may not request, using rules per user agent.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#robots-txt"
  },
  {
   "term": "Schema Markup",
   "definition": "Schema markup is code added to a web page using the Schema.org vocabulary that labels what the content is, such as a business, product, event, review or FAQ.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#schema-markup"
  },
  {
   "term": "Search Engine Optimization (SEO)",
   "definition": "Search engine optimization is improving a website's content, technical health and reputation so it earns more visibility in unpaid search results on Google and Bing.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#seo"
  },
  {
   "term": "SERP",
   "definition": "A SERP, or search engine results page, is the page a search engine shows in response to a query, including ads, organic listings, maps, AI summaries and other features.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#serp"
  },
  {
   "term": "Service-Area Business",
   "definition": "A service-area business serves customers at their location, like plumbers or cleaners, and per Google's guidelines should hide its address and list the areas it serves instead.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#service-area-business"
  },
  {
   "term": "Social Proof",
   "definition": "Social proof is evidence that other people trust and choose a business, such as reviews, testimonials, case studies, client logos, awards and media mentions.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#social-proof"
  },
  {
   "term": "Structured Data",
   "definition": "Structured data is information organized in a standard, machine-readable format so search engines and AI systems can understand facts on a page without interpreting prose.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#structured-data"
  },
  {
   "term": "Title Tag",
   "definition": "A title tag is the HTML element that sets a page's title, shown in browser tabs and often used as the clickable headline in search results.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#title-tag"
  },
  {
   "term": "Topic Cluster",
   "definition": "A topic cluster is a group of related pages built around one broad pillar page, with supporting pages covering subtopics and all of them linked together.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#topic-cluster"
  },
  {
   "term": "Unlinked Mention",
   "definition": "An unlinked mention is when a website, article or post names your brand without linking to your site.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#unlinked-mention"
  },
  {
   "term": "UTM Parameters",
   "definition": "UTM parameters are tags added to the end of a URL, such as utm_source and utm_campaign, that tell analytics tools exactly where a visit came from.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#utm"
  },
  {
   "term": "WCAG",
   "definition": "WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, is the W3C's international standard for making websites and digital content usable by people with disabilities, organized into levels A, AA and AAA.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#wcag"
  },
  {
   "term": "Wikidata",
   "definition": "Wikidata is a free, collaborative structured database run by the Wikimedia Foundation that stores facts about entities and is widely used by search engines and AI systems.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#wikidata"
  },
  {
   "term": "XML Sitemap",
   "definition": "An XML sitemap is a file listing a site's important URLs, often with last-modified dates, that helps search engines discover and recrawl pages efficiently.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#xml-sitemap"
  },
  {
   "term": "Zero-Click Search",
   "definition": "A zero-click search is one where the person gets what they need on the results page or in an AI answer and never clicks through to a website.",
   "url": "https://mentiongroup.com/glossary/#zero-click"
  }
 ]
}