Glossary

Terms from AI, marketing, direct response, SEO, and business ops. Plain-language definitions.

103 terms

A/B Test
Marketing
Comparing two variants (A and B) to determine which performs better.
AE
Sales
Account Executive. The closer role in B2B sales.
AI Agent
AI
An LLM in a loop with tools. The LLM reasons, picks actions, executes via tools, observes results, and continues until a...
AIDA
Direct Response
Attention-Interest-Desire-Action. The oldest copywriting formula (1898).
ARR
Business
Annual Recurring Revenue. Contracted subscription revenue on an annualized basis.
Attention Mechanism
AI
The mechanism by which transformers weight the importance of different parts of input when producing output.
Attribution
Marketing
Determining which marketing touchpoints get credit for a conversion.
Backlink
SEO
A link from another website to yours. A key ranking signal.
BM25
AI
Classical keyword-based information retrieval algorithm. Scores documents by term frequency and document rarity.
Burn Rate
Business
Monthly cash loss (gross burn) or net cash decrease (net burn).
Buyer Persona
Marketing
A fictionalized representation of an ICP individual: their day, worries, decisions, language.
CAC
Marketing
Customer Acquisition Cost. Total spend to acquire one customer. Includes ads, salaries, tools, commissions.
Chunking
AI
Splitting documents into smaller pieces for retrieval. Affects RAG quality significantly.
Churn
Business
Customers or revenue lost in a period. Monthly churn = cancellations / total customers.
Content Cluster
SEO
A pillar page + supporting pages on a topic, all interlinked to build topical authority.
Context Window
AI
Maximum number of tokens an LLM can process in a single request (input + output combined).
Conversion
Marketing
A desired action completed by a visitor: signup, purchase, demo request, form fill.
Conversion Rate
Marketing
Percentage of visitors who complete a conversion.
Copywriting
Direct Response
The craft of writing words designed to persuade a reader to take an action.
CPA
Marketing
Cost Per Acquisition. Cost for one conversion event (lead, sale, signup).
CPC
Marketing
Cost Per Click. Average cost for each click on your ad.
CPM
Marketing
Cost Per Mille. What you pay per 1,000 ad impressions.
CRO
Marketing
Conversion Rate Optimization. The practice of improving the % of visitors who convert.
CTA
Direct Response
Call-To-Action. The specific next step you want the reader to take.
CTR
Marketing
Click-Through Rate. Percentage of impressions that resulted in a click.
Direct Response
Direct Response
Advertising designed to elicit a measurable immediate response (buy, click, call, reply).
Discovery Call
Sales
The first substantive sales conversation. Goal: qualify the prospect, understand their situation.
Domain Rating / Authority
SEO
Scores (Ahrefs DR, Moz DA) estimating a site's authority based on backlink profile.
Embedding
AI
A vector representation of text where semantically similar text produces similar vectors.
Featured Snippet
SEO
A special SERP result that answers a query directly from your content, placed above normal rank-1.
Few-Shot Prompting
AI
Giving the LLM 2-10 examples of desired input-output pairs before the actual task.
Fine-Tuning
AI
Training an existing model on additional data to adapt it to a specific task or style.
Forecast
Sales
Prediction of what will close in a period. Usually Commit, Best Case, Pipeline, Omitted categories.
Foundation Model
AI
A large pre-trained model that can be adapted to many tasks via prompting or fine-tuning.
Function Calling
AI
The API pattern where LLMs emit structured requests to call developer-defined functions.
Funnel
Marketing
The conceptual journey from first touch to paying customer, stages narrowing like a funnel.
Google Business Profile
SEO
Free business listing on Google, shows in Maps and local search.
Grounding
AI
Ensuring LLM responses are anchored in specific factual context rather than the model's internal beliefs.
Guarantee
Direct Response
A promise to the buyer that reduces their risk (money-back, satisfaction, performance).
Hallucination
AI
An LLM producing false information that sounds plausible. The model invents facts.
Headlines
Direct Response
The first line of a piece of copy. The gate that decides if the reader continues.
Hooks
Direct Response
The opening line or moment that stops scroll / earns attention.
ICP
Marketing
Ideal Customer Profile. Detailed definition of the customer you most want to acquire.
Inbound
Sales
Leads that come to you (via content, ads, referrals).
Incrementality Testing
Marketing
Testing whether a marketing channel or tactic actually causes conversions or just captures them.
Keyword
SEO
A word or phrase users type into search engines.
Keyword Difficulty
SEO
Estimate of how hard it is to rank for a keyword. Based on competing sites' authority.
KPI
Business
Key Performance Indicator. A metric linked to a specific business goal.
Lead Generation
Direct Response
The process of attracting and capturing potential customer contact info for follow-up.
Lead Magnet
Direct Response
A free resource offered in exchange for contact information. The opt-in incentive.
LLM
AI
Large Language Model. A neural network trained on massive text data that predicts the next token in a sequence, producin...
Local SEO
SEO
Optimization for location-based searches ('dentist near me'). Focuses on Google Business Profile, local citations, revie...
Lookalike Audience
Marketing
An audience the ad platform builds to resemble your existing customers based on a 'seed' list.
LTV
Marketing
Lifetime Value. Total gross profit a customer generates over their relationship with you.
LTV:CAC
Marketing
Ratio of Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost. Below 3:1 is fragile, 5:1+ is healthy.
Marketing Mix Modeling
Marketing
Statistical modeling of total marketing spend vs total revenue to estimate each channel's contribution.
MCP
AI
Model Context Protocol. Anthropic's open protocol for LLMs to connect to external tools and data sources.
MEDDIC
Sales
Qualification framework. Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, Champion.
MER
Marketing
Media Efficiency Ratio. Total revenue divided by total ad spend. Blended across all channels.
Meta Description
SEO
The text snippet shown under your page title in search results.
MRR
Business
Monthly Recurring Revenue. ARR / 12. Useful for month-over-month growth tracking.
NRR
Business
Net Revenue Retention. Revenue from existing customers this period ÷ their revenue last period.
Offer
Direct Response
What you're asking the prospect to do and what they get in return.
OKR
Business
Objectives and Key Results. Goal-setting framework: one qualitative objective, 2-4 measurable key results.
On-Page SEO
SEO
Optimizations on the page itself: title, meta description, headings, content, internal links.
OTE
Sales
On-Target Earnings. Total compensation (base + variable) if quota is met.
Outbound
Sales
Sales activity where you initiate contact with prospects (cold email, calls, LinkedIn).
P&L
Business
Profit and Loss statement. Revenue - COGS - OpEx = Net Income.
PAS
Direct Response
Problem-Agitate-Solution. Classical copywriting formula. Name the problem, make it vivid, present the solution.
PASTOR
Direct Response
Problem-Amplify-Story-Transformation-Offer-Response. Expanded formula for long-form.
Payback Period
Marketing
How long it takes to recover CAC in gross profit from a customer.
Pipeline
Sales
Active sales opportunities at various stages, tracked in a CRM.
Product-Market Fit
Marketing
The stage where a product reliably converts prospects to paying customers in a real market.
Prompt Engineering
AI
The craft of designing LLM prompts to reliably produce desired outputs.
Prospecting
Marketing
Paid advertising aimed at new audiences who haven't engaged with the brand.
Quota
Sales
Revenue target assigned to a sales rep for a time period.
RAG
AI
Retrieval-Augmented Generation. Fetch relevant context from a knowledge base, paste into the LLM prompt, generate an ans...
Ranking
SEO
Position on the SERP. Rank 1 gets the most clicks; rank 10 gets very few.
ReAct
AI
Reasoning + Acting. The canonical agent pattern: think, act (call tool), observe result, repeat.
Reranking
AI
A second-stage model that reorders retrieved documents by relevance. Typically uses a cross-encoder.
Retargeting
Marketing
Showing ads to people who've previously interacted with your brand (visited site, watched video, etc.).
Retention
Business
The percentage of customers still active after a time period.
ROAS
Marketing
Return On Ad Spend. Revenue divided by ad spend, expressed as a multiple.
Runway
Business
How many months a company can operate at current burn rate before running out of cash.
Sales Letter
Direct Response
A long-form written piece that walks the reader from problem to solution to offer.
Scarcity
Direct Response
Quantity-based reason to act now. Limited seats, limited stock, limited capacity.
Schema Markup
SEO
Structured data that tells search engines what your content is about (article, product, event, FAQ).
SDR
Sales
Sales Development Representative. The prospecting role in B2B sales teams.
Search Volume
SEO
Estimated number of monthly searches for a keyword.
Semantic Search
AI
Search based on meaning rather than exact keywords. Uses embeddings to match intent.
SEO
SEO
Search Engine Optimization. The practice of improving a site's visibility in organic search results.
SERP
SEO
Search Engine Results Page. The page Google shows for a query.
System Prompt
AI
The instructions given to an LLM defining its role, behavior, and constraints. Appears before user messages.
Technical SEO
SEO
Site-level optimizations: crawlability, speed, mobile-friendliness, structured data, redirects.
Token
AI
Unit of text processed by LLMs. Roughly 3-4 characters or 0.75 words in English.
Tool Use
AI
An LLM's ability to request function/API calls and incorporate results into its reasoning.
Transformer
AI
The neural network architecture underlying modern LLMs. Uses self-attention to process sequences.
Urgency
Direct Response
Time-based reason to act now. Cohort closing, price rising, bonus expiring.
UTM Parameters
Marketing
URL parameters tagged onto links to track the source, medium, campaign in analytics.
Value Equation
Direct Response
Perceived value = (dream outcome × likelihood of achievement) / (time delay × effort).
Vector Database
AI
A database optimized to store and query high-dimensional vectors by similarity, not by exact match.
VSL
Direct Response
Video Sales Letter. Long-form video that pitches a single offer, structured like a classic sales letter.
Zero-Shot
AI
Asking an LLM to do a task with no examples, relying entirely on task description.

Further reading