Glossary
Plain-English definitions of the web and AI vocabulary used across our service pages — what each term means, and why it matters for a business website.
Designing a website so people using assistive technology, such as a screen reader, can use it too.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the published standard most accessibility work is measured against, covering things such as colour contrast, keyboard navigation and screen-reader-readable markup. For a business site, it means widening who can actually use it rather than treating accessibility as an optional extra.
Related: Alt text
Google's AI-generated summary, shown above the normal results for some searches.
AI Overviews are Google's own synthesised answer, shown at the top of certain search results and drawing on several sources rather than linking to just one. Appearing as a cited source inside an AI Overview can bring visibility even when a page isn't the first blue link, which is part of why structuring content clearly for machines to parse has become its own discipline.
Related: AI Search Optimisation (GEO), Answer engine
Structuring a website so AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Perplexity can find, understand and cite it.
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) applies the same technical rigour as SEO but for AI assistants that answer a question directly instead of listing links: consistent entity information, structured data, and content written as clear, citable claims. It's a newer and less standardised discipline than conventional search, and results build slowly because assistants only periodically refresh their view of a business.
Related: AI Overviews, Answer engine, SEO
We offer this: AI Search Optimisation (GEO) — £1,950 + £995/mo
A short written description of an image, read aloud by screen readers and shown if the image fails to load.
Alt text lets someone using a screen reader know what an image shows, and it's also one of the signals search engines use to understand an image they can't literally see. Every meaningful image on a business site should have it; purely decorative images can be marked so assistive technology skips over them.
Related: Accessibility (WCAG)
A search tool, such as Perplexity or an AI Overview, that gives a direct answer instead of a list of links.
An answer engine synthesises a response from multiple sources rather than returning a ranked list for a person to click through. Being cited as a source inside that answer is a different goal from ranking first on a traditional results page, and it depends on how clearly a site's content states verifiable facts.
Related: AI Overviews, AI Search Optimisation (GEO)
A defined way for two pieces of software to exchange data with each other.
An API (application programming interface) lets a website talk to another system — a payment provider, a booking calendar, an accounting package — without someone copying information between them by hand. Most modern websites are built from several APIs working together rather than one single piece of software.
Related: Workflow automation
A link from another website pointing to yours.
Backlinks act as a signal of trust to search engines: a link from a relevant, reputable site suggests your page is worth showing. Quality matters far more than quantity — a small number of relevant links from genuine sites outweighs a large number from low-quality or unrelated ones.
Related: SEO
The single web address a search engine is told to treat as the definitive version of a page.
When the same or very similar content is reachable at more than one URL — with and without a trailing slash, or via a filtered version of a listing page — a canonical tag tells search engines which one to index and rank, so the others don't compete against it or get treated as duplicates.
Ongoing monthly cover for a website after launch — security patching, backups, monitoring and support.
A website is not finished the day it launches: software needs security patching, backups need to be tested, and content needs updating. A care plan is the ongoing arrangement that covers that work, usually for a fixed monthly fee, rather than leaving a site to quietly go unpatched until something breaks.
Related: Fixed price
An automated assistant on a website that answers questions in a conversational, text-based interface.
A chatbot can range from a simple decision tree to a system that retrieves answers from a business's own documents and cites its sources. The difference matters: a well-built one declines to answer rather than inventing something plausible when its source material doesn't cover the question.
Related: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), Hallucination, Large language model (LLM)
We offer this: AI Chatbot & Site Assistant — from £2,450 + £149/mo
A content management system — the software that lets non-developers edit a website's text and images.
A CMS separates the content of a page from its design and code, so updating a price, a photo or a paragraph doesn't require a developer or a code deployment. Which CMS a site uses, and how much of it is editable, is usually decided at the point the site is built.
Google's three metrics for how a page feels to use: loading speed, responsiveness and visual stability.
Core Web Vitals measure Largest Contentful Paint (how quickly the main content appears), Interaction to Next Paint (how quickly the page responds to input) and Cumulative Layout Shift (how much the layout jumps around while loading). They are a published, measurable ranking input, and they double as a reasonable proxy for whether a site is simply pleasant to use.
Related: SEO, Responsive design
The process by which a search engine's automated software visits and reads a website's pages.
Crawling is how a search engine discovers what's on a site in the first place, by following links from page to page. A page can only be indexed and shown in results if it has been crawled, but crawling and indexing are separate steps — a crawled page is not automatically ranked or even included in the index.
Related: Indexing, robots.txt, Sitemap
A website or application built from scratch for one business, rather than assembled from a template or existing product.
A custom build makes sense when a business's workflow genuinely doesn't fit an off-the-shelf product — a booking system, a member portal, an internal tool with rules specific to how that business operates. It costs more up front than a template because the specification and the code both start from nothing, which is why it is usually scoped through a discovery phase first rather than quoted at a fixed figure blind.
Related: Fixed price
The system that translates a domain name, like example.com, into the server address that actually hosts it.
DNS (Domain Name System) is effectively the internet's address book. Changing where a website or its email is hosted means updating DNS records, and because email and web hosting often depend on different records at the same domain, moving one without carefully mapping the other is a common way to accidentally take email offline.
Related: Domain name, Hosting, Migration
The address people type or click to reach a website, such as example.co.uk.
A domain name is registered separately from where the website itself is hosted, and the two can be — and often are — provided by different companies. It needs renewing periodically, and letting a renewal lapse can take a live website and its email offline with very little warning.
Selling products or services directly through a website, including payment, stock and order handling.
E-commerce covers everything involved in taking an order online: the storefront itself, payment processing, shipping rules, stock levels and typically some accounting integration so sales don't have to be re-entered by hand. How well those parts talk to each other, more than how the storefront looks, tends to determine whether running the shop is straightforward or a constant headache.
Related: Custom build
A price agreed in advance for a defined scope of work, which doesn't change once that scope is agreed.
A fixed price only holds for the scope it was quoted against — the specific pages, features or deliverables listed at the time. Anything genuinely outside that scope is a separate, additional quote, which is different from a price simply being revised upward part-way through agreed work.
Related: Care plan, Custom build
When an AI system states something confidently that is false or unsupported, rather than admitting it doesn't know.
Hallucination happens because a language model is generating plausible-sounding text, not looking answers up in a reference book by default. It is the central risk of putting an AI system in front of customers, and the main defence is grounding answers in retrieval from a specific, known set of documents rather than the model's general training, plus an explicit instruction to decline when nothing relevant is found.
Related: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), Large language model (LLM)
The service that runs a website's files and makes them accessible on the internet.
Hosting is the server infrastructure a website actually runs on, separate from the domain name that points at it. Where a site is hosted affects its speed, uptime and how straightforwardly it can be backed up, migrated or scaled if traffic grows.
Related: Domain name, DNS
A search engine adding a crawled page to the list of pages it can show in results.
Indexing comes after crawling: a search engine has to crawl a page before it can index it, but not every crawled page gets indexed — thin, duplicate or blocked content is often left out. A page has to be indexed before it can rank for anything, which makes indexing the first real checkpoint for search visibility.
Related: Crawl, Sitemap, robots.txt
A searchable collection of a business's own documents, with an AI layer that can answer questions from it and cite its source.
A knowledge base turns scattered documents — contracts, manuals, policies, past project files — into something searchable, with answers pointing back to the specific document and page they came from so a claim can be checked rather than trusted blindly. It can be used internally by staff, or opened up as the source material behind a public-facing chatbot.
Related: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), Chatbot
The type of AI model, trained on huge amounts of text, that powers tools like ChatGPT and most modern chatbots.
A large language model predicts likely next words based on patterns learned from its training data, which is what makes it fluent but also what makes it capable of confidently generating something false. Chatbots and voice agents built for a specific business typically pair an LLM with retrieval from that business's own content, rather than relying on the model's general knowledge alone.
Related: Hallucination, Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
A proposed file, similar to robots.txt, that tells AI crawlers where to find a summary of a site's content.
llms.txt is a suggested convention, not an established standard — there is no requirement that any AI company reads it or follows it. Publishing one is a reasonable, low-cost step toward being clearly parsable by AI systems, but it should be treated as one input among several rather than a guarantee of anything.
Related: robots.txt, AI Search Optimisation (GEO)
The short summary text that can appear under a page's title in search results.
A meta description doesn't directly affect ranking, but a search engine will often display it — or rewrite it — as the snippet under a result, so a clear, accurate one improves the chance someone actually clicks through. It's written per page rather than applied site-wide, since a generic description undersells whatever that specific page is actually about.
Related: SEO
Moving a website from one platform, host or domain to another without losing its content or its search rankings.
A migration involves moving the content itself, mapping every old URL to its new equivalent with redirects, and carefully handling DNS so email isn't disrupted in the process. The redirect map is usually the part that determines whether search rankings survive the move or have to be rebuilt from nothing.
Related: Redirect (301), DNS
An instruction that permanently sends visitors and search engines from an old URL to a new one.
A 301 redirect tells browsers and search engines that a page has permanently moved, which passes on most of the old page's ranking value to its replacement rather than leaving visitors and search engines at a dead link. It's the standard tool for handling old URLs during a site rebuild or migration, and missing even a handful of them is a common way rankings are lost unnecessarily.
Related: Migration, Canonical URL
A website layout that adapts to fit different screen sizes, from a phone to a desktop monitor.
Responsive design means one set of code serves every device by rearranging and resizing itself, rather than maintaining separate mobile and desktop versions of a site. It's the baseline expectation for any site built today, given how much browsing now happens on a phone.
Related: Core Web Vitals
A technique where an AI model answers by first retrieving relevant passages from real documents, then writing a response grounded in them.
RAG is the mechanism behind a chatbot that answers from a business's own content rather than its general training: a query is matched against a set of documents, the most relevant passages are retrieved, and the model is asked to answer using only that material. It is the main practical defence against hallucination in a business-facing AI system.
Related: Hallucination, Large language model (LLM), Chatbot
A file that tells search engine and AI crawlers which parts of a site they are allowed to visit.
robots.txt controls crawling, not indexing — it can stop a well-behaved crawler visiting a page, but a page it blocks can still be indexed and shown in results if something else links to it, just without a description. It's a set of instructions crawlers are expected to respect voluntarily, not a technical barrier that enforces itself.
Machine-readable markup added to a page that describes its content explicitly, rather than leaving it to be inferred.
Structured data (often written as schema.org markup, in a format called JSON-LD) tells a search engine or AI system directly that a given block of text is a price, a FAQ answer, a business address or a review — rather than leaving it to guess from surrounding prose. It's what makes rich results, like star ratings or FAQ dropdowns, possible in search, and it's equally relied on by AI assistants trying to extract specific facts from a page.
Related: SEO, AI Search Optimisation (GEO)
Search engine optimisation — the practice of making a website easier for search engines to find, understand and rank well.
SEO covers the technical (can the site be crawled and indexed cleanly), the on-page (does the content actually answer what people are searching for) and the off-page (do other sites consider it worth linking to). It's ongoing work rather than a one-off fix, because competitors keep publishing and search engines keep changing how they evaluate pages.
Related: Core Web Vitals, Backlink, Sitemap, AI Search Optimisation (GEO)
A file listing every page on a website, submitted to search engines to help them find and crawl it all.
A sitemap (usually an XML file at /sitemap.xml) doesn't guarantee a page gets indexed, but it makes sure a search engine at least knows the page exists, which matters most for large sites or pages with few internal links pointing to them. On a site built properly it is generated automatically from the site's actual structure, rather than maintained by hand.
The certificate that encrypts traffic between a visitor's browser and a website, shown as the padlock in the address bar.
An SSL/TLS certificate is what makes a site load over https rather than the unencrypted http, protecting anything typed into it — a password, a card number, a contact form — in transit. It's also a baseline trust signal: browsers actively warn visitors away from a site that doesn't have one.
Related: Hosting, Domain name
An AI system that answers phone calls, understands what's being asked, and can book, qualify or transfer the caller.
A voice agent handles inbound calls using natural speech rather than a touch-tone menu, picking up routine requests like booking an appointment end to end and handing anything unusual to a person with the context already gathered. It's a distinct product from a chatbot, built for the phone rather than a website widget.
Related: Chatbot
Using software, sometimes with AI steps, to remove manual, repetitive work between two or more systems.
Workflow automation connects tools a business already uses so information doesn't have to be retyped between them by hand — an enquiry form feeding a CRM, a document being read and filed automatically. It works best scoped to one specific, well-understood process at a time rather than attempted as one broad programme across the whole business.
Related: API
