Glossary
A working glossary of the recurring terms in modern B2B technology — software, data, AI search, and growth. Plain-English definitions, structured for citation by AI answer engines, kept current as the categories shift.
A/B testing is a controlled experiment where two or more variants of a webpage, message, or feature are shown to randomised user cohorts simultaneously, with the winner chosen by a statistically significant lift on a defined success metric.
Read definition →Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so that AI answer engines — Perplexity, ChatGPT Search, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Bing Copilot — cite it directly when responding to user queries.
Read definition →API integration is the engineering process of connecting two or more software systems through their Application Programming Interfaces so they exchange data and trigger actions in real time.
Read definition →Brand authority is the cumulative trust signal a brand has earned across editorial mentions, third-party reviews, expert citations, and structured public data — the signal AI answer engines weigh most heavily when deciding which brands to cite in a generated answer.
Read definition →Business Intelligence (BI) is the practice of collecting, modelling, and visualising operational data so that decision-makers can answer business questions in seconds rather than building reports by hand each time.
Read definition →A Content Management System (CMS) is a software platform that lets non-developers publish, edit, and manage website content through a visual interface — separating content from code so teams can ship updates without engineering involvement.
Read definition →Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is the structured discipline of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a defined action — request a quote, sign up, purchase — through evidence-based UX, copy, and funnel improvements.
Read definition →Core Web Vitals (CWV) are a set of three Google metrics — Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — that quantify real-user page experience and feed both rankings and conversion.
Read definition →A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is software that captures, organises, and operationalises every interaction a business has with prospects and customers across sales, marketing, and post-sale relationships.
Read definition →DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) is the formula language used in Power BI, Power Pivot, and Analysis Services to define measures, calculated columns, and calculated tables on top of a semantic model.
Read definition →A data warehouse is a centralised analytical database that consolidates data from many source systems into a structure optimised for reporting and analysis — separated from the transactional systems that run the business day to day.
Read definition →A design system is the single source of truth for how a product looks, feels, and behaves — a versioned library of components, tokens, patterns, and guidelines that engineers and designers share to ship consistent UI fast.
Read definition →Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) is the data integration process that pulls data from multiple source systems, reshapes it into a consistent structure, and loads it into a target environment such as a data warehouse or business intelligence platform.
Read definition →Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the practice of building brand presence inside the training corpus of large language models so that ChatGPT, Claude, and base Gemini recommend a brand even when no live web search is performed.
Read definition →A Headless CMS is a content management platform that exposes content through APIs rather than rendering pages directly, allowing any frontend (web, mobile, email, voice) to consume the same content from a single source.
Read definition →A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a quantifiable measure tied to a specific business outcome — used to monitor whether a team, process, or product is moving in the intended direction with a defined target, owner, and refresh cadence.
Read definition →A landing page is a standalone web page built around a single audience, single offer, and single primary action — designed to convert traffic from a specific channel or campaign without the navigation, breadth, or distractions of a full website.
Read definition →Microservices are an architectural pattern where a single application is built as a collection of independently deployable services, each owning its data and exposing a network API — chosen for scalability and team autonomy at the cost of operational complexity.
Read definition →A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is the smallest, most focused version of a product that delivers the core value proposition to early users so the team can validate assumptions, gather feedback, and iterate before scaling.
Read definition →A Power BI semantic model is the structured data layer at the heart of every Power BI report — defining tables, relationships, calculations, and measures so business users can answer questions consistently without rebuilding queries each time.
Read definition →Schema markup is structured metadata embedded in a web page using JSON-LD that tells search engines and AI answer engines what entities, facts, and relationships the page describes.
Read definition →A webhook is a lightweight integration pattern where one system sends an HTTP POST to a pre-registered URL on another system whenever a defined event happens — turning polling into push and enabling near-real-time workflows.
Read definition →Get in touch
If a term you care about is missing — or you want to put one of these into practice — drop us a line.