The AI glossary, in plain English.

Above the Fold What a visitor sees before scrolling. Agentic Describes AI that plans and acts, rather than answering one question. AI Agent A system that works towards a goal and takes actions for you. AI Brief A document about your business that you paste in before you ask for anything. AI Search Asking an AI tool a question and getting a direct answer, sometimes with the pages it used, instead of a list of links. Anonymisation Removing identifying details so data can be used safely. Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) Shaping your pages so AI tools can find them, understand them and quote them in their answers. Also called GEO. API A way for one piece of software to talk to another. Automation Getting software to do a repeatable task without a person each time. Backlink A link to your site from someone else's. Bias Skew a model inherited from the material it learned from. Brand Voice The consistent way your business sounds in writing. Call to Action The specific thing you are asking the reader to do next. Chain of Thought Asking a model to work through its reasoning before answering. Chatbot A conversational interface — and not the same thing as an agent. Citability How likely a page is to be cited by AI when someone asks a question it answers. Citation A reference to a source — which AI can invent wholesale. Classification Sorting things into categories automatically. Clean Chat An AI conversation with no saved memory or earlier chats feeding into it, so you see the answer a stranger would get. Commercial Use Whether you are allowed to use AI output in paid work. Context Window How much information an AI can consider at one time. Conversion Rate The share of visitors who do the thing the page was built for. Copilot An AI that assists inside the tool you already use. Copyright Who owns AI-generated work — a genuinely unsettled question. CRM The system holding your customer records and conversations. Data Retention How long a provider keeps what you send it. Decision Board One table sorting a conversation into facts, assumptions, unknowns, risks and next actions. Deepfake Synthetic audio or video made to look like a real person. Downsell A cheaper alternative offered to someone who has just declined. Embedding A way of turning text into numbers so software can compare meaning. Fact-Checking Verifying specific claims outside the tool that produced them. Few-Shot Prompting Showing a model two or three examples of what you want. Five Whys Asking why five times in a row, to get past the symptom to the cause. Generative AI AI that creates new text, images or audio. Guarantee What you promise to do if the buyer is not satisfied. Guardrails The limits built into an AI tool to stop it doing certain things. Hallucination When an AI states something false as if it were true. Headline The first line of a page, and the one that decides whether the rest gets read. Human in the Loop A person who checks the output before it counts. Ideal Customer Avatar The single best-fit customer, described in detail. Inference The moment a model actually produces an answer — and what you pay for. Integration Two tools wired together so information moves without a person. Jailbreak Wording a request to get round a tool's restrictions. Knowledge Base Your own documents, made available to an AI so it answers from them. Knowledge Cutoff The date after which a model knows nothing, unless it can look things up. KPI The one number that tells you whether something is working. Ladder Content A page you keep updating as the subject changes. Landing Page Any page built for one campaign and one action, rather than for browsing. Large Language Model (LLM) The kind of AI that powers ChatGPT and Claude. Lead Magnet The free thing someone gets in exchange for their contact details. Licence The terms you agreed to when you started using a tool. Long-Form Content Substantial pages that cover a topic properly rather than briefly. Long-Tail Keyword A longer, more specific search phrase with fewer searches and clearer intent. Low-Ticket Offer A small paid product whose job is to turn a subscriber into a customer. Machine Learning Software that learns patterns from examples instead of following written rules. Model The trained system itself — the thing that produces the output. Multimodal A model that handles more than text — images, audio, documents. No-Code Building working systems without writing code. Objection Handling Answering the reasons someone would say no, before they have to raise them. Offer Everything the buyer gets, for what price, on what terms. Open-Source Model A model whose weights anyone can download and run. Order Bump A small add-on offered on the checkout page itself. Persona A described archetype of the person you are writing for. Personal Data (PII) Information that identifies a living person — and must not be pasted casually. Pillar Content A substantial page on a broad topic, with shorter posts clustered around it. Plugin An add-on that gives an AI tool an extra capability. Pre-Mortem Imagining your plan has already failed, then working backwards to find out why. Prompt The instruction you give an AI to get a result. Prompt Chaining Breaking one big request into a sequence of smaller ones, each using the last answer. Prompt Engineering Writing instructions that reliably get the output you meant. RAG Letting an AI look things up before it answers. Risk Reversal Moving the risk of the purchase off the buyer and onto you. ROI Whether a thing earned back more than it cost. Sales Funnel A sequence of offers at increasing levels of trust and price. Sales Page A page with one job: turn a reader into a buyer of one specific offer. Sentiment Analysis Working out the feeling behind a piece of text. Skyscraper Content Finding a page that ranks well and doing the job properly. Social Proof Evidence that other people have already trusted you and were right to. Split Testing Running two versions against each other to see which performs better. Squeeze Page A single-purpose page that trades something free for an email address. Style Guide Written rules for how your organisation writes. Summarisation Condensing long material into its essentials. System Prompt Standing instructions that apply to every message in a conversation. Temperature A dial between predictable and inventive. Testimonial A customer's own words about what changed for them. Text to Speech Turning written words into spoken audio. The 6D AI Thinking Method™ Digital Rapport®'s method for thinking a decision through with AI before you ask it for the answer. Thinking Partner Using AI to improve your thinking rather than to hand you a finished answer. Token The small chunks of text an AI reads and writes in. Training Data The material a model learned from — and the limit of what it knows. Transcription Turning spoken audio into written text. Transparency Being open about where and how you use AI. Upsell A larger or faster version of what someone has just bought, offered straight after. Value Proposition Why this person should buy this thing from you rather than from anyone else. Vector Search Searching by meaning rather than by matching words. Watermark A marker showing content was machine-generated. Workflow The sequence of steps a piece of work actually goes through. Zero-Shot Prompting Asking a model to do something with no examples at all.