If you don't understand the language, you don't exist in AI search.

Open standard co-developed by OpenAI and Stripe for AI-mediated commerce.

The top-level billing and permissions container for ChatGPT Ads. One Advertiser API key is scoped to one Ad Account.

A campaign-scoped container that holds bidding configuration and contextual targeting hints for ChatGPT Ads.

OpenAI's web dashboard for advertisers, at ads.openai.com. Opened to all U.S. advertisers May 5, 2026 with no minimum spend.

OpenAI's programmatic interface to Ads Manager, at https://api.ads.openai.com/v1. Manages campaigns, ad groups, ads, files, and insights.

Answer Engine Optimization. Subset of SEO focused on featured snippets, voice answers, and direct-answer content.

Shopify's offering for non-Shopify ecommerce brands to add products to Shopify Catalog and reach AI commerce surfaces.

Shopify's sales channel that auto-syndicates merchant catalogs to ChatGPT, Copilot, Google AI Mode, and Gemini.

Average rating across all reviews of a product. Must mirror visible page content.

How prepared a brand is to be discovered, understood, and recommended by AI.

A system where users ask questions and receive direct answers instead of links.

How often your brand appears in AI-generated answers.

Terminal status for any campaign, ad group, or ad. Irreversible — distinct from paused.

The inability to accurately track conversions from AI-driven interactions.

The ad-group object that sets billing_event_type (currently only impression) and max_bid_micros — the bid ceiling.

Microsoft's search engine. 87% of ChatGPT search citations match Bing top organic results per Seer Interactive.

Content on domains your brand controls — your store, your blog, your owned social accounts.

Headline pattern for ChatGPT Ads creative that consistently outperforms alternatives per Adthena's 2026 data.

Site navigation hierarchy schema.

The top-level container for budget, scheduling, and geographic targeting in ChatGPT Ads. Contains ad groups, which contain ads.

HTML link element specifying the authoritative URL for a page with multiple URL variants.

The only ad creative type currently supported in ChatGPT Ads. Title (3-50 chars), body (≤100 chars), image (file_id), target URL.

OpenAI's generative search and assistant product. The largest AI commerce surface as of May 2026, with ~700M+ weekly active users.

OpenAI's paid AI-search inventory. Sponsored placements adjacent to organic answers.

The percentage of prompts where your brand's URL is cited as a source. Distinct from mention rate.

Anthropic's conversational AI. Offers web search with citations; no native commerce as of May 2026.

Anthropic's retrieval crawler for Claude.

ChatGPT Ads' equivalent of Google Quality Score. The implicit ranking signal OpenAI uses to match ads to chats. Trade-press term — OpenAI hasn't published the algorithm.

Buying behavior driven by dialogue instead of browsing.

User intent expressed through natural language, including context, constraints, and preferences.

OpenAI's server-to-server endpoint for sending conversion events to ChatGPT Ads. Recommended alongside the JavaScript Pixel. Host: bzr.openai.com.

Google's page experience metrics: LCP, CLS, INP. Affects both Google ranking and AI crawl reliability.

High-traffic, high-authority pages (buying guides, comparison pages, category hubs) that anchor topical authority.

The 13-week half-life and 27-week cutoff for unrefreshed content's AI citation rate.

A market where value is created by influencing decisions, not generating traffic.

Ads that appear after or alongside AI-generated decisions.

The mechanism that prevents the same ChatGPT Ads conversion being counted twice when the pixel and CAPI both fire. Matched on Pixel ID + event name + event_id.

A phenomenon where the same advertiser appears in both organic and paid results in ChatGPT for the same prompt.

Third-party authoritative sources mentioning your brand — Reddit threads, YouTube reviews, niche blogs, listicle placements.

Accuracy, clarity, and completeness of product data — titles, attributes, images.

One of the two ChatGPT plans (along with Go) that may show ads. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu tiers do not show ads.

The drop in AI citation rates as content ages. Pages not updated within 90 days lose 40–60% of their citation rate.

Google's standalone AI app, sharing AI Mode infrastructure for shopping queries.

The practice of shaping how AI models understand and recommend your brand.

A paid ChatGPT plan that may show ads. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu do not show ads.

Google Search's generative answer layer, expanded through 2026. Runs on Universal Commerce Protocol for shopping.

Google's local-business listing. Anchors NAP consistency for AI confidence scoring.

Google's signal for whether a site allows Bard/Gemini to use its content for training. Distinct from Googlebot.

OpenAI's training crawler. Visits sites to collect data for model training.

HTML attribute specifying language and region for a page version.

The process of attaching JavaScript event handlers to server-rendered HTML in the browser.

Shopify's React-based headless storefront framework. SSR by default.

Percentage of relevant AI queries where your brand is mentioned.

ChatGPT Ads' reporting endpoints — same envelope at four scopes: ad_account, campaign, ad_group, ad. Returns delivery + cost + conversion metrics.

OpenAI's deprecated in-ChatGPT checkout feature. Launched September 2025, deprecated March 24, 2026.

ChatGPT Ads' browser-side measurement SDK. Initialised with oaiq("init", { pixelId: "..." }). Captures oppref from landing-page URLs and stores it in __oppref cookie.

JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data. Google's recommended structured data format, embedded in script blocks.

Shopify's templating language and theme system. Server-rendered by default.

"Best of" articles ranking products in a category. A critical earned-media surface for AI citation.

Large Language Model Optimization. Speculative discipline targeting inclusion in foundation-model training data.

A proposed plain-text file aimed at giving AI systems a site summary. Not adopted by any major AI provider as of May 2026.

A multi-turn conversation in ChatGPT. OpenAI considers overall context and user experience before serving an ad in long sessions.

Anthropic's open standard for connecting AI assistants to data sources and tools.

The percentage of prompts where your brand name appears in the AI's answer, cited or not.

Total revenue divided by total marketing spend.

Schema for return windows, conditions, and methods.

Millionths of the main currency unit. The Advertiser API uses micros for lifetime_spend_limit_micros and max_bid_micros. $1.00 = 1,000,000 micros.

Microsoft's AI assistant, Bing-backed for search. Launched Copilot Checkout in January 2026.

Name, Address, Phone — the trio that must match exactly across all web references.

OpenAI's retrieval crawler powering ChatGPT search results in real time.

Nested under Product schema. Required fields: price, priceCurrency, availability.

Schema for shipping cost, regions, and timing.

OpenAI's privacy-preserving ad-click identifier. Captured from the landing-page URL on click, stored in the __oppref first-party cookie. Required on Conversions API events when available.

Schema for the merchant entity itself. Holds brand-level signals: logo, sameAs links, contact info.

Advertising inside AI-driven environments where users ask questions and receive synthesized answers.

AI search engine focused on cited, sourced answers. Operates Shop Like a Pro for product discovery.

Perplexity's retrieval crawler.

The handle that identifies a ChatGPT Ads measurement endpoint. Created in the Conversions tab of Ads Manager. Used by both pixel and CAPI.

How clearly a product communicates who it's for and why it exists.

Schema.org type for an individual product. Required fields: name, image, offers.

Container schema for product variants when a single product has multiple SKUs (size, color).

A group of real user queries that express the same intent in different ways.

A standardized set of 25 prompts run weekly across all five engines to track GEO performance over time.

The stage where AI evaluates options and suggests what to choose.

Authentic participation in relevant subreddits to build brand mentions.

The rate at which fresh reviews are added across review platforms. AI engines weight recency.

The file at yourdomain.com/robots.txt that tells crawlers which pages they can access.

Schema.org property linking your entity to authoritative external identifiers (Wikidata, LinkedIn, Crunchbase).

The shared vocabulary for structured data on the web. Maintained jointly by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex.

The May 5, 2026 launch that opened ChatGPT Ads to all U.S. advertisers with no minimum spend, CPC bidding, and a JavaScript Pixel + Conversions API shipped the same day.

The discipline of ranking in blue-link search results. Foundation for GEO but not sufficient on its own.

Pages rendered as HTML on the server before delivery. AI crawlers don't execute JavaScript reliably.

The percentage of relevant prompts in which a brand is cited or mentioned by a given AI engine.

The merchant-facing dashboard. Settings > Sales Channels > Agentic Storefronts is where AI channel toggles live.

Shopify's central product data layer with LLM-enriched attributes. Powers Agentic Storefronts and Shop App.

Shopify's multi-region selling feature.

XML file listing a site's URLs for crawlers. Shopify auto-generates these.

The label OpenAI uses on every ChatGPT ad. Visual separation from the organic answer is mandatory — sponsored content is always distinguishable.

A paid ad slot adjacent to organic AI answer content. Distinct from paid inclusion in the recommendation itself.

Multiple JSON-LD entities nested in a single @graph block — e.g., Product + Offer + AggregateRating + Organization.

Any of the named conversion events in OpenAI's published taxonomy: page_viewed, contents_viewed, items_added, checkout_started, order_created, lead_created, etc. The opposite is a custom event.

ChatGPT Ads' campaign-level country include/exclude lists. Default is all countries when omitted. Ad-group-level targeting is contextual hints, not demographics.

Independent review platform commonly cited by AI engines.

Open standard co-developed by Shopify and Google for agentic commerce, covering discovery through post-purchase.

An environment where decisions happen without visiting websites.