Growth marketing collects acronyms faster than anyone can keep up — SEO, AEO, AIO, GEO, CAC, ROAS, RAG. Here's what each one actually means, in plain English, with no jargon hiding the answer. Every definition ends with the service that delivers it, so you can go from "what is this?" to "who runs it" in one click.
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Start here
The acronyms cluster into four groups: how search finds you, how the machines cite you, how you turn visits into revenue, and what you build to run on. Pick a term or scroll the whole list.
01 Getting found
Search used to mean one box on Google. Now buyers ask Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini — and each surface picks its sources differently. These are the disciplines that get you named on all of them.
SEO
The work of earning organic rankings on search engines like Google. It spans the technical health of your site, content that answers real queries, on-page tuning, and the authority you earn from other sites linking to you. Done right it compounds: a ranking you've earned keeps paying long after the work is done, with no per-click invoice.
See our SEO service →AEO
Optimizing to win the direct answer — featured snippets, "people also ask" boxes, and voice-assistant replies — rather than just the blue links beneath them. It leans on crisp, well-structured content and schema markup so an engine can lift a clean answer straight from your page. The goal: be the box, not the result under it.
See our AEO service →AIO
Earning a place in the AI-generated summary Google now writes at the top of many results. AIO is about being one of the few sources Google's model trusts enough to synthesize and cite — which favours clear, authoritative, well-sourced pages. When the AI answers the question, you want your name in the answer, not buried below it.
See our AIO service →GEO
Getting recommended and cited by generative AI engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude — when buyers ask them for advice. It's part SEO, part entity and corpus work: making sure the facts about your brand are consistent, well-linked, and trusted across the web the models train on and pull from. The new front page is a chat window.
See our GEO service →LLM citation
When a large language model — the engine behind ChatGPT or Gemini — references your brand or links your site in its answer. It's the AI-era equivalent of a top ranking: invisible to old analytics but increasingly where buyers decide. Winning citations is the measurable outcome of GEO, earned through authority, clean facts, and content the models can quote with confidence.
How we win citations →Link building
The practice of earning links from other reputable websites to yours. To search engines a link is a vote of confidence, so quality links lift your rankings and the authority that AI engines read when deciding whom to trust. The catch: links must be earned, not bought. We use digital PR and genuinely useful assets — never PBNs or spam.
See our link building →Digital PR
Public relations aimed at the web: earning coverage, mentions, and links on credible publications by giving journalists something worth writing about — original data, expert commentary, a real story. It's the cleanest, most durable way to build link authority, and the brand mentions it generates also feed how AI engines judge whether you're a trusted source.
See digital PR →Not sure which of these you're missing? The free AI visibility audit checks whether you appear in AI Overviews, get cited by ChatGPT, and rank for your money terms — then tells you exactly where the gaps are.
Run the free audit →02 Filling the pipeline
Visibility is wasted if the traffic bounces. These are the terms for turning attention into qualified pipeline — and the metrics that tell you whether the spend is actually working.
CRO
Increasing the share of visitors who take the action you want — buy, sign up, book a call — by improving the page rather than buying more traffic. It runs on data and testing: study where people drop off, form a hypothesis, run an A/B test, keep what wins. The cheapest growth lever you have, because the traffic's already paid for.
See our CRO service →Lead generation
The process of attracting and capturing potential customers — leads — and qualifying them so sales spends time on people who'll actually buy. Modern lead gen blends AI-enriched prospect lists and multichannel outbound with inbound capture from your site. AI builds and sorts the list at volume; a human owns the message and the follow-through.
See lead generation →Lifecycle marketing
Marketing to people across their whole relationship with you — welcome, nurture, purchase, retention, win-back — mostly through email and the social audience you own rather than rent. Done well, lifecycle flows quietly compound revenue from customers you already have, which is far cheaper than acquiring new ones. The list you own can't be taken away by an algorithm change.
See email & social →CAC
The total cost to win one new customer — all your sales and marketing spend over a period, divided by the customers it brought in. It's the number that tells you whether growth is profitable: if a customer costs more to acquire than they're worth over their lifetime, you're buying revenue at a loss. Lowering CAC is the quiet goal behind SEO, CRO, and sharper targeting.
Build the unit economics →ROAS
Revenue earned for every dollar spent on advertising — a 4x ROAS means four dollars back for each one spent. It's the headline metric for paid media: it tells you whether a campaign is actually making money or just moving it. We bill a flat fee, never a percentage of spend, so the incentive is your ROAS, not a bigger ad budget.
Model the return →CAC and ROAS only mean something against real revenue and retention data. We wire that reporting into your build so the numbers track themselves — no spreadsheets, no guessing whether the spend works.
Automate the reporting →
Terms into numbers
Citations, conversions, CAC, ROAS — vocabulary only matters once it shows up on a scorecard you actually read. That's the test every term on this page has to pass: each one maps to a number we report against, wired to real revenue rather than platform vanity stats.
03 Building the asset
The product and the plumbing underneath it. These terms cover what you ship to market and the AI machinery that runs the busywork once you're live.
MVP
The smallest version of a product that delivers real value and lets you learn from actual users — not a half-built app, but a focused one that proves the core idea works before you pour money into the rest. Ship it, watch how people use it, then iterate. AI-assisted development gets you to a credible MVP in weeks, not quarters.
See SaaS development →RAG
A technique that lets an AI answer from your own documents instead of only what it was trained on: it retrieves the relevant facts from your knowledge base, then generates a grounded reply. It's how you build a support bot or internal assistant that quotes your real policies and data — accurate, current, and far less likely to make things up.
Build a RAG workflow →AI agent
An AI system that doesn't just answer but acts — chaining steps and using tools to complete a task on its own, like enriching a lead list, drafting and filing reports, or routing a ticket. Agents delete the repetitive middle of a workflow. We build them so AI does the rote half and a human keeps the keys, reviewing what matters before it ships.
See AI automation & agents →An MVP that needs to rank, an agent that needs data, a site that needs to load fast — the build is where every other term on this page comes together. One team scopes it, ships it, and stays to run it.
See Build & Automate →Why a glossary, on a growth site
This page isn't filler. The way it's built — clean definitions, each one linking to the service that owns it — is the exact method we run for clients. It's called a topic cluster: a hub of related pages that link to each other so search engines and AI models can see the whole subject and trust you on it.
Read it as a map. Each term tells you what a slice of growth means; the link tells you who runs it. And the way they connect is a working demo of the SEO and GEO work we'd do for you — the site is the sales pitch.
Glossary questions
They're four ways to get found, on four surfaces. SEO wins the classic blue links. AEO wins the direct answer box and voice. AIO wins a spot in Google's AI Overview. GEO wins citations inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. They share a foundation — authority and clean, trustworthy content — which is why we run them as one pillar, Search & AI Visibility.
It matters because buyer behaviour moved. More people now ask ChatGPT or Perplexity for recommendations before they ever open Google. If the model doesn't name you, you're invisible to that buyer — and you won't see it in your old analytics. GEO is the work of becoming a source those engines trust enough to cite. It's early, which is exactly why it's worth doing now.
Both, for different jobs. ROAS tells you whether a specific ad campaign is making money right now. CAC tells you whether your overall growth is profitable against what a customer is worth over their lifetime. A campaign can post a great ROAS while your blended CAC quietly climbs — so we report both, wired to real revenue, not platform-reported vanity numbers.
Only if there's repetitive work eating your team's hours. RAG is worth it when people keep answering questions your docs already answer — a grounded bot pays for itself fast. An AI agent earns its keep when a multi-step task runs the same way every time. If neither is true yet, don't build it. AI does the rote half; we won't sell you machinery you don't need.
With a baseline. The free AI visibility audit checks whether you show up in AI Overviews, get cited by ChatGPT, and rank for your money terms — then hands you a plain-English list of the gaps. From there you'll know which terms on this page actually apply to you, and we can scope the work that matters first. No contract to find out.
Human judgment. AI horsepower.
Pick the term that's costing you customers and we'll show you the fix. One team builds the asset, gets it found, fills it with customers, and runs it — AI-leveraged, human-delivered.
Or email us directly at [email protected]