Glossary

Plain definitions of the terms behind ERP, AI in operations and AI search visibility, written by someone who runs them in production. Each term has a one-sentence answer, a longer explanation and a link to where it shows up in real work.

• llms.txt: llms.txt is a plain Markdown file placed at a website's root (/llms.txt) that gives AI assistants a short summary of the site and a curated list of its most useful pages, so a language model can find the right content quickly.
• llms-full.txt: llms-full.txt is a companion to llms.txt that holds the complete text of a site's key pages in one Markdown file, so an AI assistant can load everything it needs in a single request instead of following links page by page.
• AEO (answer engine optimisation): Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the practice of structuring web content so that answer engines, meaning AI assistants, voice assistants and featured snippets, can extract a direct, accurate answer to a question and attribute it to your site.
• GEO (generative engine optimisation): Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the practice of making a website easy for generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini to crawl, understand and cite, so that the site appears as a source in AI-generated answers.
• AI Overviews (Google): AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries Google shows at the top of some search results, built by its Gemini models from pages in Google's index, with links to the sources it used; they launched in 2024 and now appear for many queries.
• AI search visibility: AI search visibility is how often, and how accurately, a website is used and cited by AI-driven search products such as ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Copilot and Claude when people ask questions the site could answer.
• AI crawler (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and others): An AI crawler is a bot that fetches web pages for an AI vendor to train models, to build a search index for an assistant, or to fetch a page live when a user asks; most vendors use a separate user agent for each purpose.
• robots.txt for AI crawlers: robots.txt for AI crawlers means adding User-agent rules to the standard robots.txt file at a site's root that allow or disallow named AI bots individually, so a site can, for example, refuse model training while still allowing AI search engines to index it.
• JSON-LD structured data: JSON-LD structured data is a block of JSON, placed in a script tag with type application/ld+json, that describes a page's content using schema.org vocabulary (organisation, article, product, FAQ) so search engines and AI systems can read the facts without parsing the visible HTML.
• FAQPage schema: FAQPage schema is a schema.org structured data type that marks up a page's questions and answers as a list of Question items, each with an acceptedAnswer, so search engines and AI assistants can identify the exact answer text to a specific question.
• speakable schema: Speakable schema is a schema.org property (speakable, with a SpeakableSpecification) that points, using CSS selectors or XPath, to the sections of a page best suited to being read aloud by a voice assistant, typically the headline and a short summary.
• IndexNow: IndexNow is an open protocol, launched by Microsoft Bing and Yandex in 2021, that lets a website notify participating search engines the moment a URL is added, updated or deleted, by sending the URL and a site-owned key to a single API endpoint.
• ERP (enterprise resource planning): Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software runs a company's core operations, such as finance, purchasing, inventory, sales, manufacturing and HR, from one shared database, so a transaction entered once in one department is visible and correct everywhere else.
• Odoo: Odoo is a modular, open-source ERP and business application suite from Belgium, written in Python on PostgreSQL, that covers accounting, inventory, manufacturing, sales, CRM, HR, websites and more, available as a free Community edition and a paid Enterprise edition.
• ERP health check: An ERP health check is a structured review of an ERP system that tests whether its data, customisations, integrations, backups, performance and user access are sound, and produces a prioritised list of risks and fixes before they turn into outages or wrong numbers.
• ERP customisation risk (upgrade-safe customisation): ERP customisation risk is the danger that changes made to fit an ERP to a business (custom code, edited core files, database tweaks, undocumented workflows) will break, block or inflate the cost of the next upgrade; upgrade-safe customisation is the discipline of avoiding that.
• machine scheduling in an ERP: Machine scheduling in an ERP is the planning of manufacturing work orders onto specific machines or work centres over time, respecting each machine's capacity and availability, so that the schedule is realistic and no two orders claim the same machine at once.
• month-end close (as an ERP health test): Month-end close is the accounting routine of finalising a month's transactions, reconciling bank and control accounts, posting adjustments and locking the period; used as an ERP health test, it asks how much of that work happens inside the ERP and how much in spreadsheets.
• document OCR into an ERP: Document OCR into an ERP is the pipeline that turns scanned or emailed documents, most often supplier bills, into structured ERP records: extract the text with optical character recognition, interpret the fields, match them to existing data and queue the result for human approval.
• AI agent in business operations: An AI agent in business operations is software that uses a large language model to complete a defined task, such as answering a sales enquiry or processing a bill, by reading inputs, choosing actions and calling business systems such as an ERP through tools.
• human review queue (human in the loop): A human review queue is a holding area where an AI system's outputs wait for a person to approve, correct or reject them before they take effect, keeping the system's speed while catching its mistakes before they reach customers or the accounts.
• fractional Head of IT: A fractional Head of IT is an experienced IT leader who works for a company part time, typically a fixed number of days a month, taking ownership of the IT strategy, systems, suppliers and risks that a full-time Head of IT would own.
• point-in-time recovery (PITR): Point-in-time recovery (PITR) is a database backup method, standard in PostgreSQL, that combines a base backup with a continuous archive of write-ahead log (WAL) files, so the database can be restored to any chosen moment, not only to the time of the last backup.
• logical replication (PostgreSQL major upgrade): Logical replication is a PostgreSQL feature that streams row-level changes from a publisher database to a subscriber, and because it works across major versions it allows an upgrade with minimal downtime: replicate to the new version, let it catch up, then switch over.