Glossary
Forty terms covering AI search, generative engine optimisation and the travel distribution vocabulary they intersect with.
- Agentic AI
- AI systems that plan and execute multi-step tasks against real systems, rather than only generating text.
- AI Agent
- A software component that pursues a goal by calling tools and APIs on a user's behalf.
- AI Crawler
- A bot that fetches web content for training or for grounding live AI answers.
- AI Overviews
- Google's generated answer shown above the traditional results on a search page.
- AI Share of Voice
- The proportion of AI answers to a defined set of prompts in which a brand is named.
- Answer Engine OptimisationAEO
- Structuring content so it can be lifted directly as the answer to a specific question.
- Average Daily RateADR
- Average room revenue per occupied room.
- Citation
- A source an AI answer explicitly credits or links as the basis for a claim.
- Conversational Commerce
- Discovery, comparison and purchase completed inside a conversation rather than on a website.
- Crawl Budget
- The volume of fetching a crawler will spend on a site in a period.
- Destination Management OrganisationDMO
- The body that leads and coordinates a city, region or country as a travel destination.
- Direct Booking
- A reservation made with the supplier rather than through an intermediary.
- Entity
- A distinct real-world thing a model can reason about — a property, a city, a person, an organisation.
- Featured Answer
- A short extracted response displayed above or instead of the results.
- Freshness
- How recently information was published or verified, and how visibly that is stated.
- Generative Engine OptimisationGEO
- The practice of making a brand's information retrievable, accurate and citable inside AI-generated answers.
- Global Distribution SystemGDS
- The wholesale network connecting travel suppliers to agencies and sellers.
- Grounding
- Anchoring a model's answer in retrieved documents rather than in parameters alone.
- Hallucination
- A confident, fluent AI statement that is not supported by any source.
- Intent Cluster
- A group of prompts expressing the same underlying traveller need in different words.
- JSON-LD
- The JSON-based syntax for embedding structured data in a page.
- Knowledge Graph
- A structured network of entities and the relationships between them.
- Large Language Model OptimisationLLMO
- An umbrella term for influencing how language models represent a brand, used interchangeably with GEO.
- llms.txt
- A proposed plain-text file at the root of a site that points AI agents at its most useful content.
- Model Context ProtocolMCP
- An open protocol for connecting AI assistants to external data sources and tools.
- Name, Address, PhoneNAP
- The core identity facts of a physical business, and the baseline consistency test.
- National Tourism OrganisationNTO
- The national-level body responsible for promoting a country as a destination.
- Occupancy
- The share of available rooms that are sold.
- Online Travel AgencyOTA
- A platform that aggregates and sells travel inventory from many suppliers.
- Prompt Set
- A fixed, representative list of questions used to measure AI visibility over time.
- Retrieval-Augmented GenerationRAG
- Fetching relevant documents at query time and generating the answer from them.
- Revenue per Available RoomRevPAR
- Room revenue divided by available rooms — the headline hotel performance metric.
- robots.txt
- The file that tells crawlers which parts of a site they may fetch.
- Schema.org
- The shared vocabulary used to describe entities and relationships in structured data.
- Search Engine OptimisationSEO
- Making pages discoverable and competitive in a ranked list of results.
- Search Engine Results PageSERP
- The page a search engine returns for a query.
- Stale Content
- Information that was accurate when published and no longer is.
- Structured Data
- Machine-readable markup that states explicitly what a page's content means.
- Tool Use
- A model calling an external function or API to obtain data or perform an action.
- Zero-Click Search
- A search that is resolved without the user visiting any result.