Plain definitions of the terms that appear in website, eCommerce, training platform and AI search projects. Written for the person paying for the work, not the person doing it. If a term here is being used to make something sound harder than it is, that is worth noticing.
Structuring content so an AI assistant can lift a direct answer from it. In practice that means leading each section with the answer, keeping key passages to roughly forty to sixty words, and marking up questions so a parser can find them.
The AI-written summary Google places above the organic results. It cites sources, and being cited there registers in Search Console as an impression with a position even when nobody clicks. This is why a page can show a top-ten ranking and no traffic at the same time.
The broader practice of getting cited by AI systems rather than ranked by search engines. The two overlap but are not the same: a page can be cited from position twenty, and a page at position one can be cited by nobody.
Structured data added to a page so machines can read what it is: an article, a product, a FAQ, an organisation. It does not change what a human sees. It changes what a crawler understands, which is why pages carrying it are more likely to be surfaced as a rich result.
The format Google recommends for schema markup. It sits in a script tag and describes the page as data. The most common failure is not a missing block but a broken one: a URL that points somewhere that does not exist, or quotes that got HTML-escaped and stopped the block parsing.
Google's three measures of page experience: how fast the main content renders, how quickly the page responds to input, and how much the layout shifts while loading. They are a ranking input, and they are usually where an image-heavy template loses.
The tag that tells search engines which version of a page is the real one when several URLs show the same content. Without it, a site competes against itself.
A proposed file that offers AI crawlers a clean map of a site's content. Worth having, but treat it as optional. It is not a Google ranking requirement and no major engine has committed to it.
A structured content type in Webflow, such as blog posts or case studies, where every entry shares the same fields and renders through one template. Getting the fields right at the start is most of the work. Adding a field later is easy; changing how entries relate to each other is not.
A page built individually rather than generated from a CMS collection. Service pages and landing pages are usually static. The trade-off is control versus repeatability: a static page can look exactly how you want, but fifty of them means fifty edits.
Keeping a platform's back end while replacing its front end with your own code. You keep the data, the checkout and the compliance; you own the interface. It sits between using a platform as intended and leaving it entirely.
A template is a finished design you fill with your content. A custom build starts from your content and your funnel. Templates are right while you are validating an offer. They stop being right when the layout starts dictating what you are allowed to say.
A permanent instruction that a URL has moved, passing most of its ranking value to the new address. The redirect map is the single most important document in any migration, because it is what stops a relaunch from erasing the rankings the old site earned.
Total revenue divided by number of orders. Useful, but it can rise while profit per order falls, so read it next to contribution margin. A free-shipping threshold that lifts AOV and loses money is a common and expensive version of this.
What is left from an order after cost of goods, payment fees, shipping and fulfilment. This is the number most merchandising decisions should actually be judged against, rather than revenue or AOV.
Improving the share of visitors who complete the action you want. It is mostly diagnosis rather than design: finding the step that is losing people, and fixing that one rather than redesigning everything around it.
The Shopify template file that once allowed custom checkout code. It is now deprecated for the information, shipping and payment steps, and its replacement, checkout UI extensions, is available only on Shopify Plus. This is the clearest real limit on Shopify checkout customisation today.
An offer shown after the order is captured. It is the only offer placement that cannot cost you the original sale, which makes it the first place to look when raising order value. Shopify's native version runs on an extension API that requires requesting access for a live store.
How much of the card-payment security burden your business is responsible for. Staying on a hosted checkout keeps it small. Building your own checkout makes it yours permanently, which is the cost most custom eCommerce quotes leave out.
Software that delivers training and records who completed what. The delivery half is commodity. The recording half, meaning certificates, expiry dates and audit trails, is usually what decides whether an off-the-shelf platform will work for you.
A long-standing standard for packaging course content so it plays in any compliant system and reports completion back. SCORM 1.2 remains the most portable version in practice. Note that support for SCORM 2004 varies more than vendors imply, so check it before assuming a library will move.
A newer standard that records learning activity beyond course completion, including things that happen outside the platform. More flexible than SCORM, and more work to implement, so it earns its place when you genuinely need to track behaviour rather than attendance.
Recording credits against a licence or credential, usually with renewal deadlines and a reporting format a regulator specifies. This is a records problem wearing a courses costume, and it is the requirement that most often pushes a training business past a generic platform.
The decision between licensing an existing platform and commissioning your own. Count honestly: a build has a one-off cost and a permanent run cost, and a break-even that ignores the second one is wrong. Buying wins more often than agencies admit.
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