AEO, agent-readiness, and open-source foundation terms — defined

AEO is the practice of structuring a website so AI systems like ChatGPT and Perplexity can read, trust, and cite its pages when answering a question.

GEO is the practice of optimizing content so generative AI models surface it inside synthesized answers rather than a list of links.

AI search means using an AI system — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — to find information instead of scanning a traditional results page.

An agent-ready website lets AI agents — not just human visitors — read its content and act on it, typically through a machine-callable interface like an MCP server or API.

Schema markup is structured code embedded in a page's HTML — typically JSON-LD — that tells search engines and AI systems exactly what the page is about, using a shared schema.org vocabulary.

JSON-LD is a lightweight data format used to embed schema markup in a webpage — a script tag search engines and AI crawlers parse directly, without touching the visible HTML.

Entity markup is schema — using types like Organization, Person, or LocalBusiness — that identifies a specific real-world business or person, so AI systems attribute a page's claims correctly.

FAQ schema is the schema.org FAQPage type. It marks up question-and-answer content, letting search engines and AI systems extract and quote individual answers directly.

MCP is an open standard, introduced by Anthropic, that lets AI agents call tools and read structured data from an application — the same way a person uses a web interface.

Peer surfaces is AILK's term for an architecture where one capability is exposed identically to a human via web UI, an agent via MCP, and a program via HTTP API — with CI-enforced parity across all three.

Citation share is the proportion of AI-generated answers, within a topic or prompt set, in which a specific brand gets cited or recommended.

A headless CMS stores and delivers content through an API, with no built-in front-end templating — the presentation layer is built separately.

A content adapter is the integration layer connecting a headless CMS or external content source to AILK's page-rendering and schema system, so content authored elsewhere still emits correct JSON-LD.

A scaffolder is a command-line tool that generates a working project skeleton — file structure, configuration, boilerplate — from a single command instead of an empty directory.

An audit CLI scores a website's structural readiness — schema completeness, entity markup, AEO gaps — and reports the result as pass/fail output usable in a CI pipeline.

A pillar topic is a broad subject that anchors a content strategy — narrower cluster topics organize around it to build topical authority with search engines and AI systems.

Prompt tracking runs a fixed set of representative user prompts against AI models on a recurring basis, recording which brands or sources get cited in the answers.

A citation gap is a structural or content deficiency — missing schema, ambiguous entity markup, a page that doesn't emit JSON-LD — that keeps a brand from being cited even when its content is relevant.

Structured data is the broader category: any content organized in a standardized, machine-readable format. Schema markup — usually delivered as JSON-LD — is the specific version search engines and AI systems parse most often.

Apache 2.0 is a permissive open-source software license that lets anyone use, modify, and distribute code — including in proprietary commercial products — with minimal restrictions.

OSS-as-marketing describes labeling a product open-source while structurally crippling the free tier, so it functions as a lead-generation funnel rather than usable software.

A Launch Service is a productized, fixed-scope engagement in which a vendor deploys a customer's website on a given foundation within a defined timeline, rather than an open-ended custom build.

A website foundation is the underlying codebase, architecture, and structural conventions a site is built on — distinct from its content, design, or hosting.

A starter, in web development, is a pre-built project template that gives a developer a working codebase with common infrastructure already wired, instead of an empty repository.

The marginal cost of a page is the incremental time, money, or effort to add one new page to an existing site, holding the foundation constant — the cost AILK's agent-assisted scaffolding drives toward zero.