Glossary
AI commerce glossary
Plain definitions for the terms used in AI search and commerce measurement: Commerce Graph, merchant resolution, GEO, AEO, leakage, observed vs modeled.
- Commerce Graph
- Aqxle's resolved map of how demand travels from an AI answer to a completed purchase: the prompt, the cited page, the commercial link on that page, the affiliate or redirect chain, and the final merchant that captures the cart.
- Commerce link optimization
- Changing the commercial links on AI-cited pages — which merchant they point to, and through which rail — so more AI-driven demand lands in a brand's preferred channels.
- Routing intelligence
- Measurement of where demand goes rather than what caused it: which merchant a link resolves to, on which page, from which citation, at which point in time.
- Merchant resolution
- Following a commercial link through its affiliate wrappers, redirect services and tracking parameters until a single named merchant destination remains, then normalising it so the same destination is only counted once.
- Generative engine optimization (GEO)
- Work aimed at increasing how often, and how accurately, a brand is cited inside AI-generated answers. Measures presence and mention share; does not measure where the resulting click lands.
- Answer engine optimization (AEO)
- Structuring content so an assistant can lift a complete, correct answer out of a page — clear questions, self-contained answers, and machine-readable markup.
- Citation weight
- How often a given page or domain appears as a source across a category's buying-intent prompts. Pages with the highest citation weight are crawled first because they route the most demand.
- Preferred-destination capture
- The share of resolved commercial links that land on destinations a brand has declared preferred. Amazon is not automatically leakage; leakage is defined by the brand's own list.
- Leakage
- AI-driven demand that resolves to a destination outside a brand's preferred list — a competing marketplace listing, a reseller, a grey-market seller, or a competitor's product inside the same retailer.
- Observed vs modeled
- Observed values are directly measured and reproducible: link paths, redirect chains, merchant destinations, fetch dates. Modeled values — click share, value at risk — are estimated from observed routing plus stated assumptions and always published as a range.
- Agent-initiated checkout
- A purchase completed inside an assistant through an agentic commerce protocol rather than on a merchant's website. Because no outbound link is followed, this traffic sits outside link-resolution coverage and is documented as a boundary of the method.