Glossary
AI commerce glossary
Plain definitions for the terms used in AI search and commerce measurement: Commerce Graph, merchant resolution, shelf readiness, 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, the final merchant listing that captures the cart, and whether that listing can convert today.
- Leakage diagnostic
- Aqxle's core deliverable: the traced route from AI answer to retail listing, the point at which demand leaks, and the modeled opportunity cost of fixing it.
- Shelf readiness
- Whether the listing a route lands on can convert today: buyable now, sold by the brand or first party rather than a third-party seller, priced in line with other channels, and findable in the retailer's own search. Checked on a stated date and reported as observed.
- 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 does not reach a checkout the brand values. It happens in two places. On the route: the link resolves to a destination outside the brand's preferred list — a reseller, a grey-market seller, or a competitor's product inside the same retailer. On the shelf: the route reaches the intended retailer, but the listing is delisted, third-party, out of stock, priced out of line, or absent from the retailer's search. Aqxle counts both and puts a modeled opportunity cost on each.
- Observed vs modeled
- Observed values are directly measured and reproducible: link paths, redirect chains, merchant destinations, fetch dates. Modeled values — click share, opportunity cost — 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.