Glossary

Short, plain definitions of the terms that come up when a small business builds a website or software with us, or puts AI to work, from GEO to the TCPA.

Updated October 18, 2026

In short

This glossary defines the terms that come up when a small business builds a website or custom software with us, or puts AI to work. Each definition stands on its own in one paragraph, so you can read a single entry without the rest. Every term also has its own page, which covers where the term shows up in practice and which guide to read next.

Every term, defined

Search and AI answers

Answer engine: An answer engine is a search tool that replies to a question with a written answer instead of a list of links. It searches the web for pages that match the question and writes a response from what they say, usually with links to the pages it drew on. Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT search and Perplexity work this way. For a business, the practical difference is that a customer may read a summary of your page before, or instead of, visiting it, so the words on the page have to hold up when quoted.
GEO: GEO stands for generative engine optimization: generative engines are the AI tools that write a reply from the pages they find, and the optimization is the work that helps them cite a website and describe it accurately. Its base is ordinary SEO, because a page that crawlers cannot reach, or that a search index has never stored, gives an engine nothing to quote. On that base, GEO shapes each page so a passage still makes sense when it is quoted alone, with the answer stated before the detail and markup that describes only what a reader can see. It cannot buy placement or guarantee that an engine names a business.
AEO: AEO stands for answer engine optimization: shaping web pages so that tools which reply with a written answer, rather than a list of links, can find a page and quote it correctly. It covers the same ground as GEO, and the two names are often used for the same work. Google's own guidance treats both as part of SEO, since its AI answers rest on its ordinary index and ranking systems, while engines such as ChatGPT search and Perplexity read the web through their own crawlers.
llms.txt: llms.txt is a proposed Markdown file, usually placed at the root of a website, that gives AI tools a short summary of the site and links to its most useful pages. The idea is that a language model reading it gets clean text instead of menus and scripts. It is a proposal rather than a web standard, and Google says its AI features in Search need no special AI text file. For a small site it is cheap to add and easy to keep current, but it matters far less than the pages themselves.
Structured data: Structured data is code added to a web page that describes its content in a standard vocabulary, so software can read the facts without guessing. On most sites it is written as JSON-LD using the schema.org vocabulary, and it can say that a page is about a local business, a service, an article or a set of questions and answers. Search engines use it to understand a page and sometimes to show richer results. Google's rule is that the markup must describe what a reader can see on the page, never hidden or different information.
FAQ markup: FAQ markup is structured data, usually the schema.org FAQPage type written as JSON-LD, that labels the questions and answers on a page so software can read them as pairs. For years Google used it to show expandable questions under a search result, then limited that display to a few government and health sites, and its documentation changelog says FAQ rich results stopped appearing altogether from May 7, 2026. The markup still describes a page accurately, so sites that keep it do so for other readers, not for a feature in Google's results.
Sitemap: A sitemap is a file, usually XML, that lists the pages of a website a search engine should know about, often with the date each one last changed. It helps crawlers find pages that few links point to and notice when a page is updated, which matters most for new sites and sites with many pages. A sitemap is a hint rather than an order: it does not guarantee that a page will be crawled or shown, and a page left out of it can still be found through links.
IndexNow: IndexNow is an open protocol a website uses to tell search engines that a page was added, updated or deleted, instead of waiting for their crawlers to notice. The site sends the changed addresses, up to 10,000 in one request by the protocol's own FAQ, with a key that shows it controls the domain, and the participating engines share each notice with one another. IndexNow's own list of engines names Amazon, Bing, the Internet Archive, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex and Yep; Google is not on it. A notice makes quicker discovery more likely, but it does not guarantee indexing.

Software and projects

CRM: A CRM, short for customer relationship management, is the system a business uses to keep track of its customers and every conversation with them. At its simplest it is a shared list of people, each with their history and the next step, so no inquiry sits unanswered because it lives in one person's inbox. Off-the-shelf CRMs suit many businesses. A custom CRM is built around one team's own steps and reports, which makes sense when the standard products need too many workarounds to fit how the business runs.
Client portal: A client portal is a private area of a business's website or app where each customer signs in to see what concerns them: the status of their order or project, their invoices and payments, and the files shared with them. It replaces the email threads and phone calls a customer would otherwise need to ask the same questions. Because every customer sees only their own records, a portal needs logins, roles and careful rules about who can see what, which makes it software rather than a page.
Ordering system: An ordering system is the software a food or retail business uses to take orders ahead of time, on its own site or app, and to get each one to the people who prepare it. It holds the menu or catalog with its options and limits, offers pickup or delivery times, takes payment where the business chooses, and shows staff the orders in the sequence they are due. Unlike a delivery marketplace, a system the business owns keeps the customer and the order history with it and takes no commission from each order.
Automation: In a small business, automation means letting software carry out a routine task on its own when something triggers it, such as a booking, a paid invoice or a date on the calendar. The software follows a fixed rule each time: it sends the confirmation, copies the details into the right tool, drafts the document or alerts the right person. Automation suits tasks with clear steps that repeat often, and it frees people for the work that needs judgment; a plain automation decides nothing a rule has not spelled out.
Webhook: A webhook is a message one application sends to another the moment something happens, such as a payment clearing or a form being submitted. The sending app makes a web request to an address the receiving app has set up, with the details of the event attached, so the receiver can act at once instead of checking for changes every few minutes. Webhooks are how many tools connect: a payment service tells a store that an order is paid, or a booking tool tells a CRM about a new appointment.
Care plan: A care plan is a monthly agreement with a developer to look after a site once it is live: monitoring, backups, tested updates to the code it depends on, and a set allowance of small changes. It pays for upkeep, not for hosting or the domain, which stay on the owner's accounts, and not for new features, which are priced separately. The point is predictability: a fixed monthly line instead of an emergency bill when an update breaks something or a form quietly stops sending.
Change order: A change order is a short written agreement that adds to or alters the work after a project's scope has been signed. It says what changes, what it costs and how it moves the timeline, and the work starts only once the client approves it. Change orders keep a project honest in both directions: the client never finds a surprise on the final invoice, and the team building it is never asked to absorb new work that the original price did not include.

Bookings and clients

Consent form: A consent form is the document a client signs before a treatment to record that they were told what it involves, including its risks, and agreed to it. It belongs to one treatment, unlike an intake form, which covers the person. The practice and its advisers write the wording. Online, the form is read and signed on a phone before the visit, and the signed copy is stored on the client's record with the date and time, where the provider can read it before the appointment.
Intake form: An intake form is the set of questions a business asks a new client before a first appointment or a first piece of work. At a clinic or a med spa it gathers contact details, health history and the privacy statements the practice asks the client to read; at a law firm it gathers the facts of the matter. It is filled in once and updated when something changes. Online, a client completes it on a phone from a link, and the answers are saved to their record. What the form asks is for the business and its advisers to decide.
Membership: A membership is a plan a client pays for on a regular date, usually monthly, in return for a set of visits, a treatment each month or a member price. For the business it turns occasional visits into steady income, and for the client it spreads the cost. Software has to charge the card on time, track what the member has used and what remains, and handle a pause or a cancellation under the terms the business wrote. A package is the close cousin: paid once, then used up visit by visit.
Before-and-after gallery: A before-and-after gallery is a set of paired photos on a practice's website, each pair showing a client before a treatment and after it. People weighing a treatment use it to judge what the treatment can do, so it tends to sit close to the treatment pages and the consultation request. Practices usually show a pair only with the client's written consent. What may be shown or claimed through such photos is for the practice and its advisers to decide, and the site displays only the pairs the practice has cleared.
Deposit: A deposit is money a client pays when booking, before the service takes place, to hold the time, and it usually goes toward the final payment, though the business's terms can make it a separate fee. Those terms also set how much it is and what happens to it after a late cancellation or a missed appointment. Its purpose is to make a booking a commitment, which matters most where an empty slot is costly. Online, the client reads the terms on the booking screen and pays by card, and the receipt repeats those terms.

AI at work

Large language model: A large language model, or LLM, is the kind of AI that reads and writes plain language. It learns from a vast amount of text until it can predict the words most likely to come next in whatever it is given, which is how it answers a question or drafts a reply. It knows only what that text held, so about one small business it may know nothing, or something out of date. To answer for a business, it has to be given the business's own pages and records as it works, and held to them.
AI hallucination: An AI hallucination is a reply in which a language model states something false as if it were true, such as a price the business never set or a source that does not exist. It happens because the model writes the likeliest-sounding words, and nothing in that step checks them against a fact. NIST's Generative AI Profile of July 2024 calls it confabulation, known colloquially as hallucination, and lists it among the risks of generative AI. The usual guard is to hold the model to the business's own sources and send any question they do not answer to a person.
Human handoff: A human handoff is the moment an AI on a call or in a chat passes the conversation to a person. During business hours that usually means a live transfer to someone on the team; after hours it is more often a booked callback or a message with the details. A good handoff carries over what the AI already learned, so the customer does not have to start again. Which questions always go to a person, and who takes them, is settled before the AI goes live.
Call transcript: A call transcript is the text of a phone call, turned from speech into words by software while the call happens or afterwards. It differs from a recording, which keeps the audio: a transcript keeps only the words, and each is a separate thing to set up and to store. A summary is shorter again, a few lines drawn from the transcript that say who called and what happens next.
Two-party consent: Two-party consent, also called all-party consent, is the rule that a phone call may be recorded only with the agreement of everyone on it, not just one side. California works this way. Its Penal Code section 632 bars recording a confidential call without the consent of all parties, and section 632.7 requires everyone's consent to record any call carried by a cell or cordless phone, whether or not the call is confidential. In 2021 the Supreme Court of California held that section 632.7 binds the people on the call as well as outsiders. The alternative, one-party consent, lets a call be recorded when any one person on it agrees.
TCPA: TCPA stands for the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, the federal law behind the FCC's rules on calls and texts made with an automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice, and on the national do-not-call registry. The FCC treats a text message as a call under it. In February 2024 the FCC ruled that AI-generated voices are artificial voices under the TCPA, so a call made with one needs the prior express consent of the person called, unless it is an emergency or an exemption applies. When such a call carries an advertisement or is telemarketing, the rules ask for that consent in writing.
10DLC: 10DLC, short for ten-digit long code, is the system US carriers use for business texts sent from an ordinary ten-digit phone number. Each business that texts this way is filed with The Campaign Registry as a brand, and each kind of message it sends, such as appointment reminders, as a campaign. A business does not file itself: a messaging provider does it, and the provider and its partners review each campaign before the first send. The registry says approval time varies by use case and by provider, and that the review is theirs, not its own.
Bot disclosure: Bot disclosure is a plain statement that a visitor or caller is dealing with software, not a person. California's bot law, SB 1001, has been operative since July 1, 2019. It makes it unlawful to use a bot online with the intent of hiding that it is a bot from someone in California, so as to knowingly deceive them about what it says in order to drive a sale or sway a vote. Under the same section, a person who discloses that it is a bot is not liable, and the disclosure has to be clear and conspicuous, so the people the bot talks with know what it is.
API: An API, short for application programming interface, is the documented way one piece of software lets another read or change its data without a person in between. A booking tool's API might let another program see open times and add an appointment; a CRM's might let it add a contact. The maker decides what its API allows, often by plan, and its terms can limit how it is used. A tool with no public API, or one kept for approved partners, usually leaves that step with a person, or with an export someone runs.
BAA: A BAA, short for business associate agreement, is the written contract a health care provider covered by HIPAA needs with a vendor before that vendor creates, receives, keeps or sends patients' protected health information on the provider's behalf, beyond only carrying it. In it the vendor gives its assurance that the information will be safeguarded, and the contract sets what the vendor may do with it. A vendor that passes the work on needs the same assurance from the company it passes it to. The rules are federal, in 45 CFR 164.502(e) and 164.504(e).

Start with a written plan

Tell us about the business and what you need. We reply with questions, then a written plan that lists the work and its price, and nothing starts until you have read it.

Start a projectHow pricing works