Glossary
AI search and marketplace terms, defined.
Short, sourced definitions of the terms CPG brands meet when selling on Amazon and Shopify and getting recommended by AI assistants. Each entry explains why it matters, gives an example and links to deeper guides on the blog.
12 terms
Answer engine optimization (AEO)Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of making a brand and its products easy for AI assistants to find, understand, trust and recommend, so that when a shopper asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews or Amazon's shopping assistant what to buy, the product is named inside the answer instead of sitting in a list of links..Generative engine optimization (GEO)Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of improving how often and how prominently content appears in answers written by generative AI search engines.Amazon RufusAmazon Rufus is Amazon's generative AI shopping assistant.Alexa for ShoppingAlexa for Shopping is Amazon's AI shopping assistant, announced on May 13, 2026, which brings together Rufus and Alexa+.AI visibility scoreAn AI visibility score is a single number that summarises how often and how prominently AI engines recommend a product or brand across a set of buyer questions.Share of voice in AI searchShare of voice in AI search is the share of AI-generated answers, across a tracked set of buyer questions, in which your brand or product is named, compared with the competitors named in the same answers.Buy Box (Featured Offer)The Buy Box is the common name for the Offer Display on an Amazon product detail page: the area near the top that holds one or more Featured Offers with Buy Now and Add to Cart buttons.Retail mediaRetail media is advertising sold by a retailer or marketplace on its own properties and with its own shopper data.llms.txtllms.txt is a proposed standard, published at llmstxt.org on September 3, 2024, for a markdown file at the root of a website (/llms.txt) that gives large language models brief background, guidance and links to the site's most useful content, in a format that's easy for them to read at inference time..Product schema markupProduct schema markup is structured data, usually JSON-LD using the schema.org Product type, that states a product's facts in a machine-readable way: name, brand, image, description, GTIN or SKU, and an Offer with price and availability, plus reviews and ratings where they exist..1P vs 3P (Amazon Vendor vs Seller)On Amazon, 1P (first party) means a brand sells wholesale to Amazon as a vendor, and Amazon then sells to shoppers; it runs through Vendor Central, which is by invitation only.TACoS (total advertising cost of sale)TACoS, total advertising cost of sale, is ad spend divided by total sales (ad-attributed plus organic) for a product or account, shown as a percentage.
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