Glossary

Product Launch & SEO Glossary

51 launch, SEO, and AI-search terms explained in plain English, from dofollow links to llms.txt.

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization): Optimizing content to be chosen as the direct answer by answer engines, voice assistants, and AI chat tools.
AI Overviews: Google's AI-generated summaries shown at the top of some search results, with links to source pages.
ai.txt: A file at /ai.txt where a site states how AI systems may use its content, such as for search answers or model training.
Alt text: The alt attribute on an image, describing it for screen readers and search engines.
Anchor text: The visible, clickable text of a link, which tells users and search engines what the destination is about.
Backlink: A link from another website to yours, and one of the main signals search engines use to judge a page's authority.
Badge embed: A small image or widget a product adds to its own site to show it was featured on, or won on, a launch platform.
Canonical URL: The preferred URL for a page, declared with <link rel="canonical">, so search engines consolidate duplicates into one version.
Core Web Vitals: Google's three page-experience metrics: Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift.
Crawl budget: The number of URLs a search engine is willing and able to crawl on a site in a given period.
Dofollow link: A normal hyperlink without a nofollow, sponsored, or ugc attribute, so search engines can count it as an endorsement and pass ranking signals through it.
Domain Rating (DR): Ahrefs' 0-100 score for the strength of a website's backlink profile, on a logarithmic scale.
E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness: the qualities Google's quality raters use to assess content.
Entity SEO: Optimizing so search engines understand your brand as a distinct entity, a known thing with attributes and relationships.
FAQ schema: FAQPage structured data that marks up questions and answers on a page.
Featured snippet: A highlighted answer box at the top of Google results that quotes text from one page.
Freemium: A pricing model with a free plan that's useful on its own, plus paid plans for more usage or features.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): Optimizing so generative AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews mention and cite your brand.
Go-to-market (GTM) strategy: The plan for how a product reaches and wins its target customers: audience, positioning, pricing, and channels.
hreflang: An attribute that tells search engines which language or regional version of a page to show to which users.
IndexNow: An open protocol that lets a site instantly notify participating search engines when a URL is added, updated, or deleted.
Internal link: A link from one page on a site to another page on the same site.
ISO week: The ISO 8601 week-numbering system, where weeks start on Monday and week 1 is the week containing the year's first Thursday.
JSON-LD: A JSON format for adding schema.org structured data to a page, Google's recommended way to describe content for rich results.
Launch week: A concentrated week of announcements, often one feature a day, used by startups to build momentum.
Lifetime deal (LTD): A one-time payment for permanent access to a product, often sold through deal marketplaces to early adopters.
Link equity: The ranking value a link passes from one page to another, sometimes called "link juice".
llms.txt: A proposed Markdown file at /llms.txt that gives AI models a concise, curated guide to a site's most important content.
MCP (Model Context Protocol): An open protocol, introduced by Anthropic in 2024, that lets AI assistants connect to external tools and data sources in a standard way.
Meta description: The HTML summary of a page that search engines may show under the title in results.
MVP (Minimum Viable Product): The simplest version of a product that solves the core problem well enough to learn from real users.
Nofollow link: A link marked rel="nofollow", asking search engines not to treat it as an endorsement of the destination.
Open Graph tags: Meta tags (og:title, og:description, og:image) that control how a link looks when shared on social media and chat apps.
Open source: Software whose source code is published under a license that lets anyone use, modify, and redistribute it.
People Also Ask: The expandable box of related questions in Google results, each revealing a short answer from a web page.
Premium launch: A paid launch option on a directory or launch platform that adds visibility, such as a featured slot or a guaranteed date.
Product reviews: Evaluations of a product by users or experts, a key trust signal for buyers and search engines.
Product-led growth (PLG): A strategy where the product itself drives acquisition, conversion, and expansion, usually via self-serve sign-up.
Programmatic SEO: Creating many search-targeted pages from a template and a dataset, such as "best X for Y" or "X vs Y" pages.
Referring domain: A unique website that links to yours at least once. Ten links from one site count as one referring domain.
robots.txt: A plain-text file at a site's root that tells crawlers which paths they may or may not crawl.
Social proof: Evidence that other people use and trust a product, such as reviews, user counts, logos, and badges.
Soft 404: A page that tells users it doesn't exist (or has almost no content) but returns HTTP 200 instead of 404.
Soft launch: Releasing a product to a limited audience before the public launch to find problems and collect feedback.
Sponsored link (rel="sponsored"): A link attribute for links that were paid for, including ads, paid listings, and affiliate links.
Title tag: The HTML <title> of a page, shown as the clickable headline in search results and browser tabs.
Topical authority: How thoroughly and credibly a site covers a subject, as judged by search engines across many related pages.
UGC link (rel="ugc"): A link attribute that marks links inside user-generated content such as comments, forum posts, and user profiles.
Upvote: A vote from a community member saying a product, post, or comment is worth attention, used to rank launch leaderboards.
Waitlist: A sign-up list of people who want access to a product before it's publicly available.
XML sitemap: A file listing the URLs you want search engines to crawl, optionally with last-modified dates.