SEO and AI search glossary for ecommerce

The .well-known directory is the /.well-known/ path that RFC 8615 reserves at the root of a website for publishing information about the whole site at fixed addresses known in advance, such as /.well-known/security.txt.

@graph is the JSON-LD keyword that gathers several nodes in one block of structured data under a single @context.

The @id identifier is the JSON-LD keyword that gives a node in structured data a unique name, usually a URL.

A 301 redirect is the server response that says a URL has moved permanently to another address, given in the Location header.

A2A (Agent2Agent) is an open protocol that lets AI agents from different vendors work together: one agent publishes an Agent Card listing what it can do, and another hands it tasks and gets the results back without seeing its tools or internal state.

The ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol) is an open standard, created by OpenAI and Stripe, that defines how an AI agent, the buyer and the store exchange data to complete a purchase: the product catalog, the checkout session and the delegated payment credential.

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is the practice of preparing a website's content so that an answer engine, such as a search engine's featured snippet, a voice assistant or an AI chat, picks it as the direct answer to a question instead of just listing it among the results.

An Agent Card is the JSON document an AI agent uses to introduce itself in the A2A (Agent2Agent) protocol: it declares its name, its version, its skills, the addresses it listens on and the authentication it requires.

Agentic AI is a type of artificial intelligence system that, instead of just answering or generating content, pursues a goal with little human intervention: it plans the steps, uses tools to act in other systems, checks the result and adjusts the plan, coordinating one or more AI agents to do it.

An agentic browser is a web browser, or a mode of one, in which an AI agent works through pages on a person's behalf: it opens tabs, clicks, fills in forms and adds products to the cart to finish a task.

Agentic checkout is the payment phase of agentic commerce: the moment an AI agent completes the purchase on the shopper's behalf, inside the assistant itself or on the store's site, with that person's confirmation or prior permission.

Agentic commerce is a way of buying in which an AI agent acts for the buyer: it searches for products, compares them, recommends them and, when the platform and the store allow it, prepares or completes the payment.

Agentic storefronts are the Shopify feature that takes a store's products to AI channels, such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and Google's AI Mode, through Shopify Catalog and its sales channels, without a separate integration for each one.

The agents.md file is a Markdown text file written for AI agents, not for people.

AggregateOffer is the Schema.org type that sums up several offers for the same product in a single node, with the lowest price, the highest price and the number of offers, for example when several merchants sell the same model.

AggregateRating is the Schema.org type that expresses the average rating of something based on many ratings or reviews: the average score, how many ratings make it up and what scale it is on.

An AI agent is a software system that uses a language model to decide which steps to take and which tools to use to complete a task on a person's behalf, rather than just answering a question.

AI bot blocking is the set of measures a website uses to stop or limit the agents of AI companies from requesting its pages, whether to train models, to search or to serve a user.

An AI citation is an explicit reference to a web page as a source inside an answer generated by an AI assistant or AI search engine, usually a link to a URL next to the sentence that page supports.

An AI hallucination is an answer from a language model that sounds plausible but is false or not supported by the source it uses: a fact, a quote or a product feature the model states with confidence without it being true.

AI Overviews is the summary written by a Gemini model that Google shows above the search results for some queries, with links to the pages that back up the information.

AI product discovery is the stage of commerce with AI assistants and agents in which the system finds which products answer a purchase request, working from the feeds and catalogs it receives from stores and the pages it crawls, and decides which ones to show.

AI referral traffic is the set of visits that reach a website when a person clicks a link in the answer of an AI assistant or AI search engine, such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot.

AI search is a way of looking up information in which a language model retrieves pages from an index or from the web, writes an answer from them and cites some as sources, instead of just returning a list of links.

AI SEO is the work of preparing a website so that AI search engines and assistants, such as Google's AI Mode, ChatGPT or Perplexity, find its pages, understand them and cite them in their answers.

AI share of voice is the proportion of presence a brand has, against its competitors, in the answers AI assistants and AI search engines give to a set of queries.

AI visibility is the presence of a brand, its products or its pages in the answers of AI assistants and AI search engines, such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI Mode: whether they appear, for which queries and in what form, as a linked source or as a named mention.

An AI-ready product page is a product page set up so an AI assistant can understand it without seeing it the way a person does: every fact written as text and not only in images, attributes with their units, identifiers such as the GTIN, markup consistent with what is visible and access for its crawlers.

Alt text (the alt attribute) is the text description of an image that goes in the HTML code, inside the img tag, for whoever cannot see it: a person using a screen reader, a browser that does not load the image or a search engine.

An answer engine is a search system that, given a question, returns the answer directly instead of a list of links for the user to dig through.

AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol) is an open protocol, introduced by Google in September 2025, that lets an AI agent pay on a person's behalf and prove to the store and the payment network that the person authorized the purchase, using signed mandates that fix what is bought, for how much and under what conditions.

An AP2 mandate is a digitally signed record that proves what a person authorized when an AI agent buys on their behalf using the AP2 protocol (Agent Payments Protocol).

An assisted conversion is a purchase, sign-up or other conversion whose path included a channel that was not the last interaction before it was completed: that channel helped, but another one took the credit for the close.

Autonomous vs assisted agents is the distinction between two ways an AI agent can work, depending on who approves its actions with consequences: an assisted agent stops so a person confirms each important step, such as paying or sending a message, and an autonomous agent acts alone within limits that person set beforehand.

B2B (business-to-business) ecommerce is online selling between companies: a store where the buyer is a business purchasing products to resell, transform or use in its operations, not an end consumer.

A B2B price list is a table of prices that an online store assigns to a business customer or a group of customers and that replaces the public price for them: a blanket discount, a fixed price per product or variant and, often, prices by quantity tier.

A BigCommerce widget is a unit of HTML, CSS and JavaScript content, built on a Handlebars template, that is created with the Widgets API and placed in a region of a Stencil theme.

Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft's free service that lets the manager of a verified site see how Bing crawls, indexes and displays it: clicks and impressions, the status of each URL, sitemaps and IndexNow notices.

Bingbot is Microsoft Bing's standard web crawler: the program that downloads a site's pages so Bing can index them and use them in its results, in Copilot and in the answers that rely on its index.

Brand is the Schema.org type that describes a brand: the name an organization or a person uses to identify a product, a range of products or something similar.

Breadcrumbs are the row of links showing where the current page sits in a site's hierarchy, from the home page or a section down to it, for example Home › Women › Shirts.

Caching and CDNs for bots are the HTTP layers that store copies of a store's pages, on the server or on a content delivery network (CDN), and answer crawlers and AI agents with them without generating the pages again.

A canonical URL is the address a site declares as the preferred one when the same content is served from several URLs, with a rel=canonical annotation in a page's HTML or in its HTTP header.

A catalog API is the programming interface through which an ecommerce platform lets other applications read, create and modify its products, categories and variants without going through the dashboard.

A catalog audit is the review of a store's product data against a set of rules written in advance, over the whole catalog or a declared sample, to find missing fields, unusable values and differences between the catalog, the published product page, the markup and the feeds.

Catalog data coverage is the percentage of product fields that have a valid value out of those that should have one, counting only the fields that apply to each product: color on a t-shirt yes, on a USB cable no.

Catalog enrichment is the work of completing and correcting the data of every product in a store (attributes, identifiers, text and structured data) so that people, search engines and AI assistants understand it without guessing.

Catalyst is BigCommerce's headless storefront framework: an open-source application, built on Next.js and React Server Components, that requests the catalog from the GraphQL Storefront API and uses it to compose the store's pages.

A category page is the page of an online store that gathers the products of one branch of its catalog, such as "Camera backpacks", and links to each one's product page.

The ChatGPT product feed is the file or connection a store uses to send its catalog to OpenAI so its products can appear in ChatGPT's shopping answers.

ChatGPT Search is the ChatGPT feature that searches the web to answer with current information and links to the sources it uses, instead of replying only from what the model learned in training.

ChatGPT Shopping is the set of shopping features in ChatGPT: when a question has purchase intent, ChatGPT shows products with an image, a price and the stores that sell them, compares them and links to the merchant's site to buy.

ChatGPT-User is the OpenAI web agent that visits a page to carry out an action a person requests in ChatGPT or in a custom GPT.

Citation rate in a panel is a measure of presence in AI search: the share of answers, within a fixed set of queries run on declared assistants and dates, in which a site is cited as a source.

ClaudeBot is Anthropic's web crawler.

Content negotiation is the HTTP mechanism by which a server chooses which version of the same resource to deliver, in format, language or compression, according to the preferences the client declares in headers such as Accept or Accept-Language.

Content versioning is the practice of saving every version of a published text or data point with its date, its author and what changed, so you can compare them, know what was published at any given moment and go back to an earlier one.

The context window is the maximum amount of text, measured in tokens, that a language model can take into account at once when generating an answer: the instructions, the conversation, the documents it is given to read and its own answer.

A conversational query is a search typed or spoken in natural language, the way you would ask a person: a full sentence with its context and its conditions, often part of a conversation in which each question builds on the last.

Microsoft Copilot is Microsoft's artificial intelligence assistant for the general public, the one that replaced Bing Chat in November 2023.

Core Web Vitals are the three metrics Google uses to measure a page's real-world experience: LCP for loading, INP for responsiveness and CLS for visual stability.

Coupons for agents are the discount codes and promotions an AI agent applies when it buys on behalf of a person.

Crawl budget is the set of URLs on a site that a search engine can and wants to crawl.

Crawling vs indexing is the difference between reading a page and storing it.

CTR (click-through rate) is the share of impressions that end in a click: clicks divided by impressions over the same period and the same set of results, expressed as a percentage.

BigCommerce custom fields are name-and-value pairs added to a product to show data that has no field of its own, such as a book's ISBN, a shirt's fabric or a wine's vintage.

Data drift, in a product catalog, is the gap that opens over time between a value that was published and verified correctly and what the public page shows later, because something changed it: another system rewriting the field, a theme update, a deactivated app or a manual edit.

DefinedTerm is the Schema.org type that describes a word, name, acronym or phrase with a formal definition, such as a glossary entry or a category with a code.

Delegated payments are payments that an AI agent starts on behalf of a person with an authorization limited in advance, without receiving their full payment details.

Duplicate content is identical or nearly identical content that can be opened from more than one URL, within one site or across different sites.

E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) is the framework Google uses to describe the quality of a page: the creator's first-hand experience, their knowledge of the topic, their authority as a source and, above all, their trustworthiness.

The EAN code (European Article Number) is the barcode that identifies a product at the point of sale in much of the world: the EAN-13 on most products and the EAN-8 on very small packages.

Ecommerce SEO is search engine optimization applied to an online store: the work of getting its product pages, its categories and the rest of the catalog crawled, indexed and shown when someone searches for what it sells.

Embeddings are numerical representations of a text, an image or other content: lists of numbers, called vectors, that a model calculates so that similar contents end up close to each other.

An entity, in SEO, is a thing or concept that exists uniquely and can be identified without ambiguity (a person, a brand, a place, a specific product), with its attributes and its relationships to other entities.

Faceted navigation is the filter system on a category or results page that lets shoppers combine attributes, such as size, color, brand or price, to narrow the products shown.

FAQPage is the Schema.org type that marks up a web page with one or more frequently asked questions and their answers: each question as a Question and each answer as an Answer, almost always in JSON-LD.

Field overwrite is what happens when one system writes a value into a product field, such as the title, the description or a metafield, on top of one stored by another system or a person, and the previous value is lost without warning.

Gemini is Google's family of artificial intelligence models and the name of the conversational assistant that uses them, the app that replaced Bard in February 2024.

The generative AI performance report is a Google Search Console report that counts how many times links to a site were shown in Search's generative AI features, AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country, device and date.

A generative engine is a search system that combines several language models with a search engine: it reformulates the query, retrieves pages, summarizes them and writes an answer of its own from them, with citations to the sources used.

A generative summary is the text an AI search engine writes in answer to a query, drawing on several pages it retrieves at that moment, with citations or links to the sources that back it, and shows above the list of results or in place of it.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the practice of optimizing a website and its content so that generative engines, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Mode, use its pages and cite them as sources in the answers they compose, instead of just ranking them in a list of links.

Google AI Mode is a search experience inside Google in which a Gemini model answers long, multi-part or follow-up questions with a written response and links to the web pages that back it up.

Google Merchant Center is the Google tool where a store uploads and maintains its product data, such as title, price, availability, images and brand, so it can appear on Google: in Search, the Shopping tab, Images, YouTube or Gemini, as free listings or in ads.

Google-Extended is a name used in robots.txt to decide whether the content Google crawls on a site can help train future generations of the Gemini models and ground the answers of the Gemini apps and Vertex AI.

Googlebot is the generic name for the two web crawlers Google Search uses, one that simulates a mobile device and one a desktop computer, to download the pages that can then be indexed.

GPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler, which collects content that may be used to train its generative AI foundation models.

Grounding is the technique that connects a language model to external information at the moment of answering, such as a search engine's index or a company's documents, so the answer rests on those sources and not only on what the model learned in training.

The GTIN (Global Trade Item Number) is the number that uniquely identifies a trade item worldwide, with 8, 12, 13 or 14 digits, according to the GS1 standard.

Headless commerce is an online store architecture in which the frontend, the part the shopper sees, is separated from the commerce backend, which holds the catalog, cart, payments and orders.

Helpful content is content that Google describes as created primarily to help people and not to manipulate search engine rankings: original, complete, written by someone who knows the topic and that does not send the reader off to search again.

HowTo is the Schema.org type that describes instructions for achieving a result through a sequence of steps, with their materials, tools, estimated time and cost.

hreflang is the attribute a page uses to tell search engines which other URLs are versions of the same content in another language or for another region, with a code such as es, en-GB or x-default.

Indexing is the step in which a search engine analyzes a page it has already crawled (its text, its tags, its images and the HTML that results from running its JavaScript), decides whether to keep it and under which canonical URL, and stores it in its index.

IndexNow is a public protocol a website uses to tell search engines, with an HTTP request, that a URL has been created, updated or deleted, instead of waiting for them to discover it by crawling.

Information gain is, in SEO, the idea that a page is worth more when it adds facts the reader has not already seen on other pages about the same topic.

Instant Checkout is the ChatGPT feature that lets someone buy a product without leaving the chat: the person confirms the order, shipping and payment, and ChatGPT passes that data to the store with the ACP protocol so the store charges and ships.

Internal linking is the set of links that connect the pages of a single website to each other: the menu, categories, breadcrumbs or links inside a text.

ItemList is the Schema.org type that describes a list of items of any kind, such as the products in a category or a ranking.

JavaScript rendering is the step in which a browser or a crawler runs a page's scripts to get its final content, the one a person sees on screen.

JSON-LD is a W3C standard format for writing linked data in JSON.

The Knowledge Graph is Google's database of real-world things (people, places, organizations, works) and the relationships between them.

The Link rel=alternate header is a line of the HTTP response that announces that the same content exists in another version, at another address: in another language, if it carries hreflang, or in another format, if it carries type, such as a PDF or a Markdown version.

Liquid is the open-source template language Shopify created and the one its store themes are written in.

An LLM (large language model) is an artificial intelligence model trained on enormous amounts of text to predict, piece by piece, how a sequence of words continues, which lets it write, summarize or answer questions.

LLM attribution is the practice of identifying which visits, conversions or orders on a website come from assistants built on language models, such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude, using the referrer, the campaign tags and the channels in the analytics tool.

LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization) is the work of influencing what large language models, like those behind ChatGPT or Gemini, say about a brand or a product, both from what they learned in training and from what they retrieve from the web when they answer.

The llms.txt is a Markdown text file, usually placed at the root of a website, that summarizes what the site is and links its most useful pages so that a language model or an AI agent can find them when it needs to answer.

A machine-readable catalog is a product catalog published in structured formats that a program can read without interpreting the page the way a person would: structured data on every product page, feeds for each platform and tools or APIs for AI agents.

Markdown for agents is the practice of offering, alongside a page's HTML version, a version of the same content in Markdown for AI agents and language models to read.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open protocol that standardizes how an AI application connects to external data sources and tools: an MCP server exposes resources, prompt templates and tools, and the application uses them through JSON-RPC messages.

An MCP server is the program that offers tools, data and prompt templates to AI applications through the MCP (Model Context Protocol) protocol.

Merchant listings are the product results in Google Search that show purchase data, such as price, availability, shipping or returns, taken from a page where that product can be bought.

MerchantReturnPolicy is the Schema.org type that describes a store's return policy in structured data: the countries it applies in, how many days there are to return an item, how it is returned, who pays return shipping and what refund is received.

A meta description is an HTML tag in a page's head that summarizes its content in free text, meant for search engines to show as the snippet under the result's title.

A meta title is a page's title, written in the title element of its HTML head.

Shopify metafields are custom fields added to a store resource, such as a product, an order or a customer, to hold data the standard model does not have, such as care instructions or a size guide.

Microdata is a syntax in the HTML standard for writing structured data inside a page's own tags, with attributes such as itemscope, itemtype and itemprop, so the text the visitor sees is also the value machines read.

An MPN (Manufacturer Part Number) is the alphanumeric code a manufacturer assigns to each product to tell it apart inside its own catalog.

noindex is a rule placed on a web page, as a robots meta tag in the HTML or as an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, that asks search engines not to include it in their index or show it in their results.

OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's web crawler for showing sites in the results of ChatGPT's search features.

Offer is the Schema.org type that describes the terms on which an item or a service is offered: the price, the currency, the availability, the condition, how long the price is valid and who is selling.

OfferShippingDetails is the Schema.org type that describes an offer's shipping terms: which destination it ships to, how much it costs and how long it takes to arrive, adding up order handling and transit.

Organization is the Schema.org type that describes an organization, such as a company, a nonprofit or a club: its name, legal name, website, logo, contact details and the profiles that identify it on other sites.

Pay per crawl is a Cloudflare feature, in closed beta since July 2025, that lets a site owner charge AI crawlers each time they request a page.

A PDP (product detail page) is the ecommerce name for the product page: the page of an online store devoted to a single product, with its images, price, variants and buy button.

Perplexity is an AI search engine that answers each question with text composed from web pages it retrieves and links as sources, instead of returning a list of results.

PerplexityBot is Perplexity's web crawler, which visits sites to show and link them in Perplexity's search results.

A PIM (Product Information Management) is the system where a company gathers, completes and approves its product information, such as attributes, copy, images and translations, to then send it to every channel where it sells: its online store, a marketplace, a printed catalog or a feed.

A PLP (product listing page) is the page of an online store that shows several products at once, each with its image, name and price, and links to each one's product page.

Price and availability signals are the data a store uses to declare what a product costs and whether it can be bought: the price with its currency, the sale price and the stock, published at once on the product page, in structured data and in feeds.

Product is the Schema.org type that describes a specific product or service being offered: its name, its image, its brand, its identifiers and its features.

Product attributes are the specific, checkable characteristics of an item, such as color, size, material, dimensions or capacity, stored as name and value pairs in dedicated fields rather than inside the description.

A product catalog is the organized set of all the items a store sells, with each one's data kept in fields: identifiers, variants, attributes, prices, stock, images and categories.

A product description is the text on a product page that explains what the product is, who it is for and what sets it apart, with details such as dimensions, materials, uses and limits.

A product feed is a file or a connection that sends a store's catalog to another platform, with one row per product or variant and the fields that platform asks for: ID, title, description, link, image, price and availability.

The product graph is the set of structured data nodes that describe a product on its page, linked to one another: the Product, its offer (Offer), the store that sells it (Organization), its brand (Brand) and its reviews (Review).

A product page is the page of an online store dedicated to a single product, from which it can be bought: it brings together its name, images, price, availability, variants, description and features.

Product reviews are opinions about a specific item, and the name covers two things: what customers leave on a store's product page, with a rating and some text, and the write-ups an expert or a publication produces to compare products.

A product taxonomy is a hierarchical classification system that sorts the products of a catalog into categories, from general to specific, like "Home & Garden › Kitchen & Dining › Kitchen Appliances › Electric Kettles." It can be the store's own or a standard one, like Google's and Shopify's, which give each category an identifier and, in Shopify, its attributes.

Product variants are the versions of a single item that differ only in one or more attributes, such as size, color or material, and that are sold grouped under a parent product.

ProductGroup is the Schema.org type that groups the variants of a single product, the versions that differ only in things like size, color or material.

A protocol gateway is an intermediary that sits between AI agents and the services they use and translates between protocols: it turns, for example, the operations of a REST API into MCP tools, or gives a single entry point to MCP, A2A and model traffic.

Publication verification is the check that a piece of data saved in the admin of a store or a tool (a price, a meta description, a JSON-LD block) really appears on the public page, as the server sends it and as a browser or a crawler renders it.

Purchase intent is a person's willingness to buy a product, expressed in what they search for or ask for.

Query fan-out (also called query decomposition) is the technique an AI search engine uses to split a question into subtopics and run several related searches at once, gathering more results before it writes the answer.

RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) is an artificial intelligence technique in which a system, before a language model answers, retrieves relevant documents from an index or a knowledge base and hands them to the model to read, so the answer rests on them and not only on what the model learned in training.

RDFa (Resource Description Framework in Attributes) is a W3C specification for writing structured data with attributes inside the HTML itself, such as vocab, typeof and property, so that the visible text of the page is also the data machines read.

A return policy is the public document in which a store explains the conditions under which it accepts returns: the deadline, the condition of the product, how it is sent back, who pays return shipping, which products are excluded and what refund the customer gets.

Review is the Schema.org type that describes a specific review of an item: who writes it, what it rates, the score it gives and its text.

Rich results are search results that Google shows with more information than the usual title, link and text: for a product, the price, the availability, the review stars or the shipping details.

The Rich Results Test is Google's tool that analyzes a public URL or a code snippet and says which rich results in Search can be generated from its structured data, with its errors, warnings and a preview.

robots.txt is a text file placed at the root of a website that tells crawlers which URLs they may request and which they may not, with rules grouped by each bot's name.

sameAs is a Schema.org property that links an entity described in structured data to pages on other sites that identify unambiguously who or what it is, such as its Wikidata entry, its Wikipedia article or its official social network profile.

Scaled content abuse is a Google spam policy that prohibits generating many pages mainly to manipulate search rankings rather than to help the people who read them.

Schema markup is code added to a page to describe its content with the Schema.org vocabulary, written in JSON-LD, microdata or RDFa, so a search engine knows what the page presents (a product, an offer, an organization) and with what data.

A schema validator, like the Schema Markup Validator, is a tool that reads the markup of a page or a snippet of code and checks that it is well formed and that it uses the Schema.org vocabulary correctly.

Schema.org is a shared vocabulary for describing things on the web (products, offers, organizations, people, events) with types and properties that have fixed names, maintained by a community project founded by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex.

Search Console is Google's free service that lets whoever manages a verified site check how Google Search sees it: which pages are indexed and why others are missing, which queries it appears for, how many clicks and impressions it gets and, since August 2026, how many impressions it earns in AI Overviews and AI Mode.

The Search Console generative AI control is the Google setting that lets a site owner decide whether their links and content can appear in Search's generative AI features: AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover's generative AI.

A search impression is each time a link to your site appears on a results page that someone has seen or could have seen, even if they never scrolled down to it.

Search intent is the goal a person has when they type a query into a search engine: what they want to get out of the results, beyond the words they use.

A search prompt is the text a person types or dictates to an AI assistant with web access, such as ChatGPT, Claude or Google's AI Mode, to get an answer based on search results.

Semantic enrichment is the work of making explicit what each piece of product data means so a machine does not have to interpret it: declaring what kind of thing it is, using properties from a shared vocabulary such as schema.org, normalizing values with units, codes and closed lists, and linking each entity with stable identifiers.

Semantic search is a search technique that interprets the meaning and intent of a query, not just its exact words, to return relevant content even when it does not share the same terms: it understands synonyms, relationships between concepts and context.

Semantic SEO is the practice of creating and organizing a site's content around topics, entities and the searcher's intent, rather than isolated keywords, so that a search engine understands what each page is about and how it relates to the others.

SGE (Search Generative Experience) was Google's experiment, opened in Search Labs in May 2023, that answered some searches with an AI-generated summary and links to dig deeper.

A Shopify app embed is a block in an app's theme extension that Shopify inserts before the closing head or body tag, without editing the theme code.

Shopify Catalog is Shopify's product database for AI channels: it gathers the products of stores that meet its requirements, structures them and distributes them to assistants such as ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot, and exposes them to AI agents through a search API.

A Shopify collection is a group of products in a Shopify store that is published as a page of its own, with its URL under /collections/, its title, its description and the list of its products.

A Shopify metaobject is a custom record type, with several fields, that a merchant or an app defines to store structured data that does not belong to any standard store resource, such as a size guide or a designer's profile.

A shopping agent is an AI agent that acts on behalf of the person buying: it takes an assignment, searches and compares products across several stores, prepares the cart and, if it has permission, completes the payment, normally after the person confirms.

A SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) is the code a store assigns to each product, and to each variant, to track its inventory and sales.

Speakable is the Schema.org property that flags which sections of a web page or article are best suited to being read aloud with text-to-speech.

Server-side rendering (SSR) is the technique by which the server builds a page's complete HTML before sending it, so the browser or a crawler receives the content already written in the first response.

Stencil is BigCommerce's theme engine: the system used to build and customize the stores the platform itself hosts, with Handlebars templates, Sass styles and JavaScript.

Structured data is information about a page written in a standardized format and with a shared vocabulary, such as Schema.org, so a search engine or another program knows what the page contains without deducing it from the text: that a product page sells a specific product, at what price, in what currency and whether it is in stock.

A token is the unit of text a language model works with: a short word, a piece of a word or a punctuation mark.

Tool calling, or function calling, is the ability of a language model to answer, instead of with text, with a structured request to run a function the application has described to it, with the function's name and its arguments.

Topical authority is, in SEO, the idea that a site gains visibility on a topic when it covers it in depth and is recognized as a reference source on it, beyond the value of each individual page.

UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol) is an open standard, driven by Google and developed with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart, that defines how an AI agent discovers what a store sells, builds the cart, pays and tracks the order.

UGC (user-generated content) is content published on a website by people who do not own it: in a store, customers' reviews and ratings, their photos and videos, the questions and answers on a product page, or comments.

The user agent is the text string with which a browser, a crawler or any other program identifies itself to a web server on every request, in the User-Agent HTTP header.

Vector search is a retrieval technique that turns queries and documents into numeric vectors, called embeddings, and returns the documents whose vectors sit closest to the query's.

Web Bot Auth is a protocol, in IETF draft, with which a bot or an AI agent cryptographically signs its HTTP requests so that the site receiving them can check who sent them, without trusting the name it declares or its IP.

A web crawler is a program that travels the web automatically: it downloads pages, follows their links to discover others and hands what it finds to the system it works for, such as a search engine's index or an AI assistant.

A webhook is an HTTP notification that a platform sends automatically to another application's address when a specific event occurs, such as an order being created or a product changing.

WebSite and SearchAction are two Schema.org types that go together.

An XML sitemap is a file in XML format that lists the URLs of a website that its owner wants search engines to know about, with optional data such as each one's last modification date.

A zero-click search is a search that ends without the person clicking any result: they abandon it, reformulate it or settle for what they see on the results page itself, such as an AI-generated summary, a featured snippet or a business listing.