Glossary of Export & AI Marketing Terms
Key terms across AI customer acquisition, SEO/GEO and B2B export trade — in one page.
This glossary defines the terms that come up in export digital marketing — from SEO, AEO and GEO to cold email, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, Incoterms and RFQ. Each entry carries a short, standalone definition so buyers, factories and AI answer engines can understand them at a glance.
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
- AEO is the practice of optimizing content so AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) extract and cite it directly as the answer — centered on answer-first structure, structured data and entity clarity.
- Alibaba Gold Supplier / TrustScore
- Gold Supplier is Alibaba's paid verified membership, while TrustScore aggregates product, marketing and trading performance. Higher scores lift search ranking and buyer trust on the platform.
- Canonical URL
- A canonical URL is the preferred version of a page declared to search engines when the same content is reachable at multiple URLs, consolidating ranking signals and preventing duplicate-content dilution.
- Cold Email
- Cold email is outreach sent to a prospective buyer with no prior relationship. Effective cold email emphasizes personalization and relevance rather than mass-sent templates.
- CTR (Click-Through Rate)
- CTR is the share of people who click your result after seeing it. Even with a good ranking, a low CTR usually means the title or description doesn't match search intent.
- DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail)
- DKIM uses a cryptographic signature to verify that an email was not altered in transit and genuinely comes from the claimed domain — a key authentication mechanism for deliverability and trust.
- DMARC
- DMARC builds on SPF and DKIM, telling receivers how to handle messages that fail authentication (allow, quarantine or reject) and providing reports — protecting a domain from impersonation.
- Email Deliverability
- Deliverability is the rate at which outreach emails reach the inbox rather than the spam folder, driven by sending-domain reputation and authentication records like SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
- FAQPage Schema
- FAQPage is a structured-data type that marks up on-page questions and answers in machine-readable form, unlocking FAQ rich results in Google and raising the odds of citation by AI answer engines.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
- GEO is the strategy of optimizing for generative AI search — engines that generate an answer rather than list links — so your brand is cited and recommended within AI-generated responses. Often used interchangeably with AEO.
- Google AI Overviews
- Google AI Overviews are AI-generated summary answers shown at the top of Google search results, citing several source pages. Being cited reaches buyers before they click any link.
- hreflang
- hreflang is an annotation that tells search engines which language/region versions of a page exist, so Google serves the right locale to each buyer and avoids duplicate-content issues on multilingual sites.
- ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
- An ICP is a profile of the customer type best suited to your product or service — covering industry, size, region and buying role — used to target prospecting precisely and lift reply and close rates.
- Inbound Marketing
- Inbound marketing draws buyers in through SEO content, websites and resources so they find you on their own terms — building a compounding, long-term digital asset.
- Incoterms
- Incoterms are standardized trade terms from the International Chamber of Commerce (such as FOB, CIF, DDP) that define where responsibility for shipping, risk and cost passes between buyer and seller.
- Knowledge Graph / Entity
- A knowledge graph is the database search engines and AI use to understand real-world things (entities) and their relationships. Making your brand a clear, disambiguated entity is a prerequisite for being cited correctly by AI.
- LLM (Large Language Model)
- An LLM is an AI model trained on vast amounts of text to understand and generate natural language. LLMs power AI assistants and answer engines such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.
- llms.txt
- llms.txt is a Markdown file at a site's root that gives AI crawlers a clean, curated map of the site and key company facts — modeled on robots.txt — to help AI find the most authoritative content.
- MOQ (Minimum Order Quantity)
- MOQ is the smallest quantity a supplier is willing to produce per order. For smaller brands, a factory's MOQ often determines whether a partnership is feasible.
- Outbound Prospecting
- Outbound prospecting proactively reaches out to prospective buyers — via cold email or LinkedIn, for example — producing immediate, controllable inquiry flow.
- RFQ (Request for Quotation)
- An RFQ is a formal document in which a buyer asks suppliers to quote on specific products or parts — one of the strongest buying-intent signals in the B2B export procurement process.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
- SEO is the practice of optimizing a website's content and technical structure so its pages rank higher in organic search results on engines like Google and get found by target buyers.
- SERP (Search Engine Results Page)
- A SERP is the page returned after a query. Today it includes not just organic links but also AI Overviews, rich results and ads competing for attention.
- SPF (Sender Policy Framework)
- SPF is a DNS record listing the servers authorized to send email for a domain, helping receivers verify the sender and reducing spoofing and spam filtering.
- Structured Data (JSON-LD)
- Structured data marks up page content in a machine-readable format (commonly JSON-LD) using the Schema.org vocabulary, so search engines and AI can accurately understand what a page is and who published it.
- Topic Cluster / Pillar
- A topic cluster is a content structure where one core "pillar" page links to many related articles, signaling comprehensive topical authority to search engines and AI.