Glossary
At a glance
- What you get
- Understand every word in the guide without looking it up elsewhere.
- Time
- 5 minutes
- Plan
- All plans
- agents.md
- A file with instructions for AI agents that shop: how to browse the catalog, how checkout works, the store’s policies.
- AI agent
- A program that uses artificial intelligence to do something on a person’s behalf, for example find a product or compare stores.
- AI assistant (or AI engine)
- A service such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google AI Overviews that answers questions with written text, sometimes citing stores.
- Alt text
- The description of an image, read by people using a screen reader and by search engines.
- App block
- An app element you add to a specific spot on a theme page. GEO FAQ is an app block for the product page.
- App embed
- An app block switched on for the whole theme with a toggle, from the theme editor. GEO Schema is an app embed.
- API key
- A long password that lets an external program read data. Keep it secret.
- Automated collection
- A Shopify collection that gathers products sharing a feature by itself, for example the same vendor or the same tag.
- Bot (or crawler)
- A program that visits web pages automatically to read their content. GPTBot is OpenAI’s bot (ChatGPT), ClaudeBot is Anthropic’s (Claude), PerplexityBot is Perplexity’s.
- Canonical URL
- The official address of a page, the one engines should cite when the same page has several addresses.
- Custom Liquid
- A theme section where code can be written by hand. The hidden blocks check looks at these sections.
- Earned media
- Other people’s sites (blogs, reviews, forums) that cover a topic and that AI assistants cite in their answers.
- Extractability
- How easy it is for an AI engine to pull concrete facts out of a product description. More measurable facts and fewer vague adjectives make it higher.
- FAQ
- Frequently asked questions: question-and-answer pairs about a product.
- GEO
- Generative Engine Optimization: making a store easy for AI assistants to read and cite. It’s different from SEO, which works on Google’s classic results.
- GEO Score
- The 0-to-100 score the app gives to the structured data of a product or of the store.
- GTIN / EAN
- A product’s barcode number, assigned by the manufacturer. The app can’t make it up.
- JSON-LD
- The most common way of writing structured data inside a page. If the theme and the app write the same type of data, you get a duplicate.
- llms.txt and llms-full.txt
- Public files listing products and collections in a format designed for AI programs. llms-full.txt is the complete version, with descriptions and FAQs.
- MCP
- Model Context Protocol: a standard way for an AI assistant to connect to a service and read data. Shopping assistants and programs like Claude Desktop use it.
- Meta description and SEO title
- The text and title shown in search results under the link to the page.
- Online Store channel
- The Shopify sales channel that corresponds to your website. A product not published on this channel doesn’t show on your site.
- Organization schema
- Your company details (legal name, VAT number, address, profiles) written on the home page in a standard format.
- Published theme
- The theme customers see. A store can have several themes, but only one is published.
- robots.txt
- A site file that tells bots which pages they may visit. The theme or Shopify manages it, not the app.
- SKU
- The internal code you assign to a product or variant.
- Social profiles (sameAs)
- Links to the company’s official profiles. They help engines understand that the store and the profiles are the same business.
- Status code
- The number a site replies with when a page is opened: 200 means all good, 404 page not found, 503 service unavailable.
- Structured data
- Product information (price, availability, brand, policies) written in the page in a standard format called schema.org, which search engines and AI engines read without interpreting the text.
- Tag
- A free label you put on products in Shopify to group them.
- Theme editor
- The Shopify screen where you customise your store’s theme: you open it from Online Store › Themes › Customize.
- Vendor
- A product’s brand or manufacturer, in Shopify’s “Vendor” field.