Glossary
Startup launch and SEO glossary
34 terms founders run into when they launch a product and try to get found: links, search, AI search and launch day itself. Each one is defined in a sentence, explained, and shown with an example.
Launching
- Beta launchA beta launch releases a product that works but is not finished, to real users who accept rough edges in exchange for early access and a say in what gets built.
- ISO weekAn ISO week is a week numbered by the ISO 8601 standard: weeks start on Monday, and week 1 is the week that contains the year's first Thursday. A year has 52 or 53 ISO weeks.
- Launch badgeA launch badge is a small image a maker places on their own site to show the product launched or ranked on a platform. It links back to the product's page on that platform.
- Launch platformA launch platform is a website where makers publish a new product so early adopters can discover it, vote on it and give feedback. Product Hunt, Hacker News and Aback Launch are examples.
- Product Hunt launchA Product Hunt launch is publishing your product on Product Hunt for one day, starting at 12:01 a.m. Pacific Time, where it competes with that day's other launches for upvotes and a spot on the leaderboard.
- RelaunchA relaunch is launching an existing product again, usually after a major update, a new positioning or a long gap, so a new audience sees what has changed.
- Show HNShow HN is a post type on Hacker News for sharing something you made that other people can try. The title starts with "Show HN:" and the community votes and comments on it.
- Soft launchA soft launch is releasing a product quietly to a small audience before a public launch, to find problems and collect feedback while the stakes are low.
- UpvoteAn upvote is a vote of approval on a launch platform or forum. Upvotes decide a launch's position in rankings and leaderboards, and with it how many people see it.
- WaitlistA waitlist is a list of people who have asked to be told when a product launches, usually collected with an email form on a pre-launch landing page.
Links
- Anchor textAnchor text is the visible, clickable text of a link. Search engines read it as a short description of the page the link points to.
- BacklinkA backlink is a link from another website to yours. Search engines use backlinks to discover your pages and as a signal of how much other sites trust them.
- Dofollow linkA dofollow link is an ordinary HTML link with no nofollow, ugc or sponsored value in its rel attribute. Search engines can follow it and count it as a vote for the page it points to.
- Domain Rating (DR)Domain Rating is a score from 0 to 100, made by Ahrefs, that estimates how strong a website's backlink profile is compared with other sites. Moz's Domain Authority is a similar score.
- Link equityLink equity is the ranking value a link passes from one page to another. It depends on the linking page's own strength, its relevance and how the link is marked.
- Nofollow linkA nofollow link is a link with rel="nofollow". It tells search engines the site does not vouch for the target, so the link is treated as a hint rather than a vote.
- Sponsored linkA sponsored link carries rel="sponsored" and marks a link that exists because of payment, such as an ad, an affiliate link or a paid placement.
- UGC linkA UGC link carries rel="ugc" and marks a link that a user, not the site, put on the page, such as a link in a comment, a forum post or a public profile.
Search
- 301 redirectA 301 redirect is an HTTP response that tells browsers and search engines a page has moved permanently to a new URL. Search engines move the old URL's signals to the new one.
- Canonical URLA canonical URL is the one address you want search engines to index for a page that can be reached at several. You declare it with <link rel="canonical" href="..."> in the page's head.
- Crawl budgetCrawl budget is the number of URLs a search engine is willing and able to fetch from your site in a given time. It matters most for large sites and sites with many low value URLs.
- Featured snippetA featured snippet is a short answer Google shows above the regular results, taken from one page and credited with a link. It appears for many question style searches.
- IndexNowIndexNow is an open protocol that lets a website notify search engines the moment a URL is added, updated or deleted, instead of waiting for them to crawl it.
- Meta descriptionA meta description is a short summary of a page in its HTML head. Search engines often show it under the title in results, so it works as the page's pitch to searchers.
- NoindexNoindex is a directive that asks search engines to keep a page out of their results. It is set with <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> or an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header.
- Open GraphOpen Graph is a set of meta tags, such as og:title, og:description and og:image, that control how a link looks when it is shared on social networks and chat apps.
- robots.txtrobots.txt is a plain text file at the root of a site that tells crawlers which paths they may and may not fetch. It controls crawling, not indexing.
- Schema markupSchema markup is structured data, usually written as JSON-LD, that describes a page's content in the schema.org vocabulary so search engines and AI systems can understand it without guessing.
- XML sitemapAn XML sitemap is a file that lists the URLs you want search engines to crawl and index, optionally with the date each page last changed.
AI search
- ai.txtai.txt is a plain text file at a site's root that states, in plain language, how AI systems may use the site's content and which facts they should know about it.
- Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is shaping content so that search features and assistants can lift a direct answer from it, such as a featured snippet, a People Also Ask box, a voice answer or an AI summary.
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of making your content easy for AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews to find, understand and cite in their answers.
- llms.txtllms.txt is a Markdown file at the root of a website that gives large language models a short summary of the site and links to its most useful pages, so they can read it without parsing every page.
- Markdown twinA Markdown twin is a plain Markdown version of an HTML page, served at a parallel URL such as page.md or on request with Accept: text/markdown, so AI tools can read the content without the page's markup.