Glossary
AI and local search words, in plain English
No jargon without an explanation. If a word in your scan report didn’t make sense, you’ll find it here.
- AI search
- Asking an assistant instead of typing keywords.
- When a customer asks ChatGPT, Google’s AI answers, Perplexity, Claude or Copilot a question like “who’s a good emergency plumber near me?”, that is AI search. The assistant looks things up (or draws on what it learned earlier) and replies with a few named businesses instead of a page of links.
- Crawler (robot, bot)
- A program that visits web pages automatically.
- Search engines and AI companies send programs to visit websites and read them. These are called crawlers, robots or bots. Each one has a name, such as Googlebot, Bingbot, OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI) or PerplexityBot. If a crawler can’t get into your site, its search engine or AI tool can’t learn about you.
- Training crawler
- A robot that collects pages to teach future AI models.
- Some crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended and others) copy web pages to help train AI models. Blocking them is a legitimate choice about your own content, and it does not remove you from search results. Allowing them may help AI models learn your business name over time. Either choice is fine as long as you made it on purpose.
- robots.txt
- A sign on your website’s door for visiting robots.
- A small public text file at yoursite.com/robots.txt that tells visiting robots which parts of your site they may read. Mistakes here are one of the most common reasons AI tools can’t see a business. Our robots.txt tool writes a safe one for you.
- Sitemap
- A list of all your pages for search engines.
- A file (usually at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml) that lists the pages on your website, so search engines can be sure they’ve found everything. Most website builders and SEO plugins create one automatically.
- Noindex
- An instruction that hides a page from search engines.
- A hidden setting on a page that says “don’t include me in search results”. It is useful for private pages, but if it is set on your home page by accident (often by a “discourage search engines” switch left on after the site was built), you’ll be invisible in search and AI answers.
- Firewall / bot protection
- Security that sometimes blocks the good robots too.
- Security services such as Cloudflare, Wordfence or Sucuri can turn away automated visitors. That protects you from bad robots, but if the settings are too strict, search and AI crawlers are turned away too. A web person can allow the well-known good ones.
- JavaScript and “server-rendering”
- Whether your words are in the page, or added afterwards.
- Some websites are nearly empty when they first load and use small programs (JavaScript) to fill in the words. People don’t notice, but many AI robots read the page without running those programs, so they see little or nothing. “Server-rendered” or “pre-rendered” pages have the words in the page from the start.
- Page title
- The blue headline in search results.
- A hidden setting (the “title tag”) that sets the headline shown in search results and in your browser tab. It is the first thing a robot learns about a page, so it should say what you do and where.
- Page summary (meta description)
- The grey snippet under the headline in search results.
- A hidden one- or two-sentence summary of the page. Search engines often show it under your headline, and assistants may quote it.
- Headings (H1, H2)
- The titles and sub-titles on your page.
- Pages are organised with headings. The main heading is called an H1 (there should be one), and the sub-headings are H2s, H3s and so on. Robots use them to understand what each part of the page is about and to quote the right part.
- FAQ
- A list of questions customers ask, with short answers.
- Frequently Asked Questions. Assistants are built to answer questions, so a page that already contains plain questions and direct answers is easy for them to use.
- Canonical address
- Which web address is the “real” one.
- The same page can often be reached at several addresses (with or without “www”, with a tracking code, and so on). A canonical link tells search engines which one is the official version, so they don’t treat copies as separate pages.
- Alt text
- A short written description of a picture.
- Robots can’t see pictures, and some visitors use screen readers. Alt text is a short description attached to a picture (“Plumber repairing a kitchen sink in Austin”) so everyone can tell what it shows.
- Structured data (schema, JSON-LD)
- Labels on your page that computers can read.
- A hidden block of code that states your facts in a fixed format: business name, address, phone, hours, services, profiles. It is invisible to visitors but lets search engines and AI tools read your details without guessing. “Schema.org” is the shared vocabulary and “JSON-LD” is the format most often used. Our schema tool builds it from a short form.
- LocalBusiness
- The label that says “I’m a local business”.
- In structured data, LocalBusiness is the label for businesses with a place or service area. There are more specific versions (Plumber, Dentist, Restaurant, Attorney and many more). The more specific, the better.
- NAP (name, address, phone)
- Your business’s basic identity, which must match everywhere.
- Name, Address and Phone number. Search engines compare these across your website, Google profile, Facebook, Yelp and directories. When they all match exactly, they trust that it’s one real business. Differences like “St.” vs “Street” or an old phone number weaken that trust.
- sameAs (linked profiles)
- A list of your other official pages.
- A line in your structured data that lists your other official profiles (Google Business Profile, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp). It tells search engines “all of these are us”.
- Google Business Profile
- Your free listing on Google Search and Maps.
- Formerly “Google My Business”. It’s the listing with your photos, hours, reviews and a map pin. For local businesses it’s the closest thing to a master record, and Google’s local answers and many AI assistants lean on it. Link it to your website and your website back to it.
- Open Graph (link preview)
- The picture and text shown when a page is shared.
- Hidden settings that control how your page looks when someone shares it in a message, social post or AI chat: the title, description and picture.
- llms.txt
- An optional plain-text summary written for AI tools.
- A proposed file at yoursite.com/llms.txt that gives AI tools a short overview of your business. No major AI provider has confirmed that it affects recommendations, so it is a small optional extra, not a priority.
- HTTPS / SSL certificate
- The padlock that means the connection is secure.
- HTTPS is the secure version of a web address. It needs an SSL certificate, which most hosts provide free. Without it, browsers warn visitors that your site is “Not secure”.
- Mobile viewport
- The setting that makes a page fit a phone screen.
- A hidden setting that tells phones to fit the page to their screen instead of showing a tiny desktop version. Most local searches happen on phones.
- Bing Places
- Microsoft’s free business listing.
- Like Google Business Profile, but for Bing. It feeds Microsoft Copilot and other products built on Bing, so it is worth the twenty minutes to claim.
- Apple Business Connect
- Apple’s free business listing.
- Controls how your business appears in Apple Maps, Siri and other Apple apps.
See which of these apply to you
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