Glossary
Wikipedia and AI-visibility terms in plain language, with links to the governing policies.
# AEO (answer engine optimization)
Answer engine optimization is an industry label for making a brand's information easy for answer engines, meaning AI assistants and AI search features that reply directly instead of only listing links, to find, understand and cite; in practice it overlaps with GEO and with ordinary SEO. For readers considering third-party 'AEO' or 'GEO' services, Google points to its guidance on evaluating SEO advice. WikiBusines sells a 'Wikipedia AEO' service, a Wikipedia and Wikidata foundation for answer engines, and says outcomes are framed as probabilities.
# Answer engine
An answer engine is an AI-powered search or assistant product, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI summaries, that replies to a question with a composed answer instead of only a list of links. Pew Research found that AI summaries appeared in about 18% of the Google searches it observed in March 2025, and that users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits with a summary versus 15% without. Because the answer is composed from sources, its accuracy depends on the sources it draws on.
# Articles for Creation (AfC)
Articles for Creation is the English Wikipedia process in which a volunteer reviewer assesses a submitted draft before it moves into the main encyclopedia. WP:COI recommends that paid and other conflicted editors submit new articles this way instead of creating them directly, and asks them not to act as reviewers of articles they are affected by. A submitted draft can be declined, so submission is not an assurance of publication.
# Conflict of interest (COI)
A conflict of interest arises when an editor's relationship with a topic, as employee, contractor, client or in another financial or personal capacity, could bias what they write. English Wikipedia's WP:COI guideline strongly discourages affected editors from editing the article directly and recommends proposing changes on Talk pages and submitting new articles through Articles for Creation. Paid editors must in addition disclose under WP:PAID, and the guideline states that no paid editor can promise any outcome for an article.
# Domain Rating (DR)
Domain Rating is a third-party SEO metric from Ahrefs that scores the strength of a website's backlink profile on a scale of 0 to 100. It is an estimate of link authority, not a measure of accuracy, traffic or Google ranking, and the values drift as link indexes update. WikiBusines publishes a reference table of estimated DR values for Wikipedia language editions and treats the figures as approximate.
# Edit request
An edit request is a message on an article's Talk page, for conflicted editors usually made with the {{edit COI}} template, asking independent volunteers to review a proposed change and make it if appropriate. WP:COI recommends this route to paid and other conflicted editors instead of editing the article directly. Volunteers review requests at their own discretion and are advised to do their own search for independent sources rather than rely on those the requester supplies, so a request is not an assurance of acceptance.
# GEO (generative engine optimization)
Generative engine optimization is the practice of shaping content so that generative AI search engines are more likely to use and cite it in their answers; the term was formalized in a 2024 KDD paper by Aggarwal and colleagues. That study reported visibility gains of up to 40% on its GEO-bench benchmark, with effects that varied by domain, which is a ceiling on a benchmark and not a typical commercial result. Google's guidance says that, from its perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is still SEO.
# Grokipedia
Grokipedia is an AI-written online encyclopedia, described by The Verge in October 2026 as a SpaceXAI product unaffiliated with Wikipedia. It launched on 27 October 2025 with roughly 885,000 machine-generated articles; according to Lawfare it stopped processing human-suggested edits from about 24 April 2026, and The Verge reported a v0.3 update on 1 October 2026 after edits resumed. WikiBusines's standalone Grokipedia placement service was discontinued in June 2026, and the hub makes no claim about influencing the site.
# JSON-LD
JSON-LD is a way of embedding structured data, using the schema.org vocabulary, in a web page as a JSON block so that search engines and other software can read the page's entities and facts. This hub uses it to describe the organization, the datasets, the glossary and the FAQ on its pages. Google says no special structured data or schema.org markup is required to appear in its generative AI search features, so markup supports machine readability but does not by itself secure visibility.
# Knowledge panel
A knowledge panel is the information card that Google shows beside search results for an entity such as a company or a person. Google's own systems decide whether a panel appears; WikiBusines states that they are fed in part by Wikidata and Wikipedia but that Google makes the final call, and it does not promise that a panel will appear.
# llms.txt
llms.txt is a plain-text file placed at a website's root that offers language models a concise, curated description of the site and links to its key pages. Adoption is common but use is unproven: in an Ahrefs study of 137,210 domains, 28% published the file and 97% of those files received zero traffic in May 2026, and no major AI platform has committed to reading it. Google says Google Search ignores such files, so creating one neither helps nor harms ranking there. This hub publishes one as a transparent reference layer, not as a way to gain visibility.
# Notability
On Wikipedia, notability is the test of whether a topic merits its own article. For organizations it is met by significant coverage in multiple reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject; the subject's own website, advertising and press releases do not count. Volunteer editors decide notability case by case, and no company is treated as notable automatically.
# Paid-contribution disclosure
Under section 4 of the Wikimedia Terms of Use, anyone who is paid, or expects to be paid, for a contribution must disclose each employer, client and affiliation, in a user-page statement, a Talk-page statement or an edit summary. Public advertisements for paid-editing services must list the Wikipedia accounts used, and breaches of the undisclosed-paid-editing rules can lead to binding 'Marketing Company Mediation'. Individual Wikimedia projects may adopt their own disclosure policies, stricter or lighter.
# RAG (retrieval-augmented generation)
Retrieval-augmented generation is an architecture in which an AI system first retrieves relevant documents from a collection or the web and then writes its answer using them, so the answer can cite sources rather than rely only on what the model memorized in training. Structured, source-backed material such as answer packs and chunked pages is built to suit this retrieval step. WikiBusines's LLM Knowledge Hub product includes an answer pack for RAG, and this hub provides one of its own.
# Reliable sources
On Wikipedia, reliable sources are published works with editorial oversight and a reputation for accuracy; for notability they must also be secondary and independent of the subject. Press releases, sponsored content, advertising and the subject's own website are not treated as independent coverage. WikiBusines says its source assessment excludes press releases and sponsored content.
# Simple English Wikipedia
Simple English Wikipedia is a separate Wikipedia language edition written in basic English and run by its own volunteer community under the Wikimedia Foundation; it is one of the 348 active Wikipedias on Wikimedia's own list (checked 2026-10-29). WikiBusines presents it as a route with lighter editorial enforcement when the main English edition is unlikely to accept a page, and sells page creation there as a distinct service. A page there is not a page on English Wikipedia and remains subject to its own community's decisions.
# Sockpuppet
A sockpuppet is an additional account operated by a person who already has another account on the same project, typically to evade a block or to give a false impression of independent support. Suspected cases are examined in sockpuppet investigations (SPI), where a filer presents behavioural or technical evidence and volunteers decide; a filing is an allegation, not a decision. Accounts can be blocked as suspected sockpuppets on behavioural similarity, and hypotheses that do not hold up are rejected.
# Source reliability tiers (A–E)
This hub grades every source from A to E by the provenance and editorial accountability of its publisher, not by whether a given statement is true: A is primary official or peer-reviewed material, B is institutional or company-official (self-reported) material, C is established media and directories, D is social and profile pages, and E is volunteer-written encyclopedia and community pages. Everything WikiBusines says about itself is tier B and is marked company-official and not independently verified. Wikimedia community records about the company are tier E, flagged for owner review and quoted with attribution and date.
# Talk page and Teahouse
Every Wikipedia article has an associated Talk page where editors discuss changes to it. Editors with a conflict of interest are expected to raise proposed changes there as edit requests, and paid editors may place their disclosure on the Talk page of the articles they work on. The Teahouse is a separate volunteer-run help space where newcomers can ask questions about editing.
# Wikidata
Wikidata is the Wikimedia projects' free, collaboratively edited knowledge base of structured data: each entity is an item with an identifier and statements. Search and AI systems can read this machine-readable layer, and WikiBusines creates or refreshes Wikidata items in parallel with page-creation projects. Items about organizations are subject to Wikidata's own notability requirements, so creating an item does not assure that it will be kept.
# Wikimedia Terms of Use
The Wikimedia Terms of Use are the Wikimedia Foundation's rules for using its projects; the current version has been in effect since 7 June 2023. Section 4 requires disclosure of each employer, client and affiliation for paid contributions, asks that public advertisements for paid-editing services list the accounts used, treats infringing Wikimedia trademarks to advertise such services as a violation, and provides for binding mediation in cases of undisclosed paid editing. Individual projects may adopt their own, stricter or lighter, disclosure policies.
# Wikitia
Wikitia is an online encyclopedia that is separate from Wikipedia and is not a Wikimedia project. WikiBusines lists a Wikitia page-creation product, which its catalog describes as an encyclopedic page with professional editorial review and no mandatory media-coverage requirement. A Wikitia page is not a Wikipedia page and does not by itself meet Wikipedia's notability standard; the hub claims nothing about Wikitia beyond the company's own description.
# WP:NCORP (notability for organizations and companies)
WP:NCORP is English Wikipedia's notability guideline for organizations and companies. It states that no company is inherently notable and requires significant coverage in multiple reliable secondary sources independent of the subject. Advertising, press releases and inclusion in 'best of' or 'top 100' lists are not treated as independent or substantial coverage. WikiBusines says every engagement begins with an assessment against it.
# WP:PAID
WP:PAID is the shortcut for English Wikipedia's policy 'Paid-contribution disclosure', which repeats the Terms of Use requirement and adds conduct rules. Confidentiality agreements do not remove the duty to disclose, paid editors need a registered account and must link their Wikipedia accounts wherever they advertise their services, and editors who fail to disclose are prohibited from editing. WikiBusines cites it as the basis of its disclosure practice.
# WP:PAIDLIST
WP:PAIDLIST is the shortcut for 'Wikipedia:List of paid editing companies', a working list of companies involved in paid editing that volunteer editors maintain, sorted into sections for undisclosed paid editing, disclosed paid editing, disclosed but blocked, and defunct. On 2026-10-29 it held 197 entries in the undisclosed section and 11 in the disclosed one (counted from the page's wikitext). The page describes itself as not necessarily factual or authoritative, so it is a community record rather than a finding by the Wikimedia Foundation.
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