Glossary
Our glossary from A to Z — the key terms from digitalisation, online marketing, web development and artificial intelligence, explained simply.
A/B testing
Controlled testing of two variants (A vs. B) to optimise content on the basis of data.
Analytics, tracking & reportingA/B testing tools
Software that tests two or more versions of a page against each other to find the better one.
Analytics, tracking & reportingAgent memory
The mechanism an AI agent uses to store and retrieve information across steps and sessions.
AI agentsAgentic AI
An AI paradigm that acts autonomously, with a goal in mind and across several steps, instead of merely answering single prompts.
AI agentsAGI (Artificial General Intelligence)
AGI refers to a hypothetical AI that can think and learn across arbitrary tasks in a human-like way.
AI fundamentalsAI agent builder
A platform for building, configuring and deploying AI agents, often no-code or low-code.
AI agentsAI alignment
AI alignment means bringing the goals and behaviour of AI systems into line with human values and safety.
AI fundamentalsAI content
Content created with generative AI — text, images, video and audio — for marketing and the web.
Marketing & growthAI governance
A framework of policies, roles and controls for responsible and compliant AI.
Enterprise AIAI personalisation
AI adapts content, offers and experiences to individual users in real time.
Marketing & growthAI security
Protecting AI systems and their data against risks such as prompt injection and data leaks.
Enterprise AIAI SEO
AI SEO uses AI tools and agents for keyword research, content, technical audits and SEO at scale.
Marketing & growthAI workflow
An AI workflow is a structured sequence of steps in which AI models and tools work together.
AI automationAnthropic
An AI company focused on safety, known for the Claude models and for MCP.
AI modelsAPI (application programming interface)
An interface through which software systems communicate with each other and exchange data.
Developers & APIsASI (Artificial Superintelligence)
A hypothetical AI that far surpasses human intelligence in almost every field.
AI fundamentalsAttention mechanism
The core mechanism of the transformer architecture, weighting how relevant individual tokens are to each other.
LLMs & language modelsAttribution model
An attribution model determines how credit for a conversion is distributed across the touchpoints involved.
Analytics, tracking & reportingAutoGen
A Microsoft framework for multi-agent conversations in which AI agents chat with one another, solve tasks and run code.
Developers & APIsChurn rate
A metric showing what share of customers leave within a period — a key indicator of retention and growth.
Marketing & growthBias (AI bias)
AI bias refers to systematic distortions in AI results that can lead to unfair or discriminatory decisions.
AI fundamentalsBounce rate
The share of visitors who leave a website after a single page without any further interaction.
Analytics, tracking & reportingBrowser agent (web agent)
An AI agent that operates a web browser to complete tasks online on its own.
AI agentsBusiness intelligence tools
Software that brings data from different sources together, evaluates it and visualises it in interactive dashboards.
Analytics, tracking & reportingAI copilot
An AI copilot is an AI assistant that supports people at work while the person stays in control.
AI agentsCEO dashboard
A highly condensed top-level dashboard with a few strategically decisive KPIs for management.
Analytics, tracking & reportingChain of thought
Chain of thought is a technique in which a language model reasons step by step in order to solve tasks better.
LLMs & language modelsChatGPT
OpenAI's AI chatbot, built on the large language models of the GPT series.
AI modelsChunking
Splitting documents into meaningful sections (chunks) before storing them as embeddings.
RAG & knowledgeClaude (Anthropic)
Claude is Anthropic's family of language models, comprising Haiku, Sonnet, Opus and the new flagship model Fable 5.
AI modelsClick-through rate
The ratio of clicks to impressions, showing how often a link or advert is clicked.
Analytics, tracking & reportingCoding agent (AI coding agent)
An AI agent that writes, reads, changes, runs, tests and debugs code on its own.
AI agentsComputer use
An AI agent's ability to operate a computer the way a person does — via screen, mouse and keyboard.
AI agentsConsent management (cookie consent)
Consent management organises how cookie consent is obtained, managed and documented in a legally sound way.
Analytics, tracking & reportingConsent management platform
Software that obtains, documents and manages cookie and tracking consent in a legally sound way.
Analytics, tracking & reportingConstitutional AI
Anthropic's training approach, in which AI models are guided by a set of governing principles.
LLMs & language modelsContent marketing
A marketing approach that builds reach, trust and demand with useful content instead of advertising directly.
Marketing & growthContext engineering
Context engineering shapes the information an LLM receives so that its answers become more precise and more reliable.
LLMs & language modelsContext window
The context window is the maximum number of tokens a language model can take into account at once.
LLMs & language modelsConversion rate
The share of visitors who complete a desired action — the central metric in online marketing.
Marketing & growthConversion tracking
Conversion tracking measures which user actions are triggered by which channels and campaigns.
Analytics, tracking & reportingConversion rate optimisation
A systematic process that increases the share of website visitors who complete a desired action.
Analytics, tracking & reportingCookieless tracking
Cookieless tracking measures user behaviour without third-party cookies, for example through first-party data.
Analytics, tracking & reportingCrewAI
A Python framework for role-based multi-agent teams in which AI agents collaborate with clear roles and goals.
Developers & APIsCRM (Customer Relationship Management)
A system for centrally managing customer relationships, contacts and sales processes.
Marketing & growthCustomer acquisition cost
A metric for the average cost of winning a single new customer.
Marketing & growthCustomer data platform
A customer data platform (CDP) brings customer data from every source together into one central, unified profile and makes it available to other systems.
Analytics, tracking & reportingCustomer journey
A customer's entire journey across every touchpoint and channel.
Marketing & growthCustomer journey mapping
A method that maps every touchpoint a customer has with a brand across the stages of the buying process.
Marketing & growthCustomer lifetime value (CLV)
The expected total value of a customer across the whole relationship — the basis for budgeting and steering.
Marketing & growthCohort analysis
An analysis method that compares groups of users who started at the same time, making behaviour and retention visible over time.
Analytics, tracking & reportingDALL-E
OpenAI's AI image generator, which creates images from text descriptions and is built into ChatGPT, so images can be produced and refined in conversation.
AI modelsData warehouse
A central database that brings structured data from many sources together so it can be evaluated efficiently for analysis and reporting.
Analytics, tracking & reportingData-driven marketing
A marketing approach that bases strategy, campaigns and optimisation systematically on data and metrics rather than intuition.
Marketing & growthDeep learning
Deep learning uses deep neural networks to recognise complex patterns in large volumes of data automatically.
AI fundamentalsDeep research
Deep research refers to AI agents that independently research many sources on a question and produce a referenced report.
AI agentsDeepSeek
A Chinese AI model family known for strong, cost-efficient reasoning models, some of them available as open source.
AI modelsDigital employee
An AI-powered digital colleague that independently takes on defined roles or task packages, in support or back office for example.
AI automationDistillation (model distillation)
A method in which a small student model imitates the behaviour of a large teacher model.
AI fundamentalsEmail marketing
Direct marketing by email and newsletter to win customers, keep them and grow revenue.
Marketing & growthEmail marketing tools
Software that lets companies create, send, automate and evaluate newsletters.
Marketing & growthEmbedding
An embedding is a numerical vector representation of meaning that places similar content close together.
LLMs & language modelsEnterprise AI
Company-wide, productive use of AI with a focus on security, scalability and integration.
Enterprise AIEU AI Act
The EU's AI Regulation governs artificial intelligence on a risk basis and sets clear requirements for companies.
Enterprise AIEvent tracking
Event tracking records individual user actions — clicks, scrolls, downloads or purchases — as measurable events for web analytics.
Analytics, tracking & reportingExpert system
A rule-based AI system that uses a knowledge base and an inference engine to reproduce expert decisions in a narrowly defined field.
AI fundamentalsExplainable AI (XAI)
Explainable AI covers methods that make the decisions of AI systems traceable and transparent for people.
AI fundamentalsFew-shot learning
A technique in which a language model is shown a few examples directly in the prompt so that it solves a task following the demonstrated pattern.
LLMs & language modelsFine-tuning
Fine-tuning is the targeted retraining of a pre-trained AI model for a specific use case.
AI fundamentalsFirst-party data
First-party data is data a company collects directly from its own users, with their consent.
Analytics, tracking & reportingFoundation model
A foundation model is a broadly pre-trained AI base model that can be adapted to many tasks.
AI fundamentalsFunction calling
An LLM's ability to output structured calls to predefined functions, with their arguments, as JSON.
Developers & APIsGenerative AI
Generative AI independently creates new content — text, images, audio or code — based on patterns it has learned.
AI fundamentalsGEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
GEO optimises content so that AI answer engines such as ChatGPT and Perplexity cite and recommend it.
Marketing & growthGoogle Analytics acquisition
The GA4 acquisition report shows which channels and sources bring users to your website.
Analytics, tracking & reportingGoogle Analytics alternatives
Privacy-friendly, capable web analytics tools as an alternative to Google Analytics 4.
Analytics, tracking & reportingGoogle Consent Mode
Google Consent Mode adjusts the behaviour of Google tags dynamically to the user's consent status, enabling GDPR-compliant tracking.
Analytics, tracking & reportingGoogle Gemini
Google DeepMind's natively multimodal AI model family for text, image, audio and video.
AI modelsGPT
GPT is OpenAI's family of generative, transformer-based language models that understand and produce text.
AI modelsGPT-5
GPT-5 is OpenAI's current frontier model generation, with strong reasoning and multimodal capabilities.
AI modelsGraphQL
A query language and runtime for APIs that lets clients request exactly the data they need.
Developers & APIsGrok (xAI)
A family of AI models from xAI, built into the X platform, with vision and reasoning abilities.
AI modelsGuardrails
Technical and organisational guardrails that secure and control how AI systems behave.
Enterprise AIHallucination (AI hallucination)
An AI hallucination is output from an AI model that sounds plausible but is factually wrong.
AI fundamentalsHeatmap (website heatmap)
A heatmap uses colour to show where visitors click, scroll and direct their attention.
Analytics, tracking & reportingHeatmap tools
Software that visualises how website visitors click, scroll and move.
Analytics, tracking & reportingHugging Face
The central open-source platform for AI models, datasets and demos, with its Model Hub, Transformers library and Spaces.
Developers & APIsHuman in the loop (HITL)
Involving people in AI-supported processes to check, approve or correct decisions.
Enterprise AIHybrid search
A search method combining classic keyword search with semantic vector search to return both exact and meaning-based matches.
RAG & knowledgeHyperautomation
A strategic approach to automating many processes end to end through the interplay of several technologies.
AI automationAI image generation
AI turns text descriptions into images for marketing, the web and social media.
Marketing & growthAI video generation
AI turns text or images into short videos and clips for advertising and social media.
Marketing & growthCampaign reporting
Evaluating individual advertising campaigns against the key performance metrics.
Analytics, tracking & reportingKeyword analyser
Analysing search terms by volume, competition, intent and difficulty for SEO and SEA.
Marketing & growthAI agent
An AI system that pursues goals on its own: perceiving, planning, using tools and acting across several steps.
AI agentsAI automation
AI automation uses LLMs and agents to automate even unstructured business processes end to end.
AI automationAI consulting
Guiding companies through the strategy, delivery and scaling of AI solutions.
Enterprise AIAI transformation
A strategic shift towards AI-supported processes, products and ways of working across the company.
Enterprise AIKnowledge base
A structured, maintained body of knowledge that serves as a source for AI applications, RAG and customer service.
RAG & knowledgeKnowledge graph
A structured representation of knowledge made up of entities (nodes) and their relationships (edges).
AI fundamentalsKPI (Key Performance Indicator)
A key metric that makes progress towards a specific business goal measurable.
Analytics, tracking & reportingKPI reporting
Reporting on the key metrics used to measure success and steer activity.
Analytics, tracking & reportingLangChain
An open-source framework for building applications with large language models.
Developers & APIsLangGraph
A graph-based framework from LangChain for stateful, cyclical AI agent workflows with nodes, edges and shared state.
Developers & APIsLead scoring
A method for scoring leads based on their behaviour and profile attributes.
Marketing & growthLead generation
The process of winning qualified prospects, along with their contact details, for marketing and sales.
Marketing & growthLlama (Meta)
Meta's open-weights model family, which can be self-hosted and adapted.
AI modelsLLM (Large Language Model)
An LLM is an AI language model that understands and produces text by predicting the most likely next word.
LLMs & language modelsLLM evaluation
A systematic assessment of the quality, safety and reliability of language models and LLM applications.
Enterprise AILocal SEO
A branch of search engine optimisation aimed at better visibility in local searches.
Marketing & growthLooker Studio (Google Data Studio)
A free Google tool for data visualisation that brings GA4, Google Ads, Sheets and more together in dashboards.
Analytics, tracking & reportingMachine learning
Machine learning enables systems to learn from data and make predictions without being explicitly programmed.
AI fundamentalsManagement dashboard
A condensed, real-time view of the key metrics as a basis for management decisions.
Analytics, tracking & reportingMarketing automation
Software-driven automation of marketing processes such as email sequences and lead nurturing.
Marketing & growthMarketing funnel
A model of the stages prospects pass through from first contact to purchase.
Marketing & growthMarketing KPIs
Core marketing metrics such as CAC, ROAS, conversion rate and CLV for measuring marketing success.
Analytics, tracking & reportingMarketing reporting
Structured, regular preparation of marketing data and KPIs as a basis for decisions.
Analytics, tracking & reportingMarketing automation tools
Platforms that automate recurring marketing processes such as lead nurturing and campaigns on a rule basis.
Marketing & growthMCP server
A component of the Model Context Protocol that provides tools, resources and prompts to AI applications.
MCP & protocolsMidjourney
An AI image generator that turns text descriptions into high-quality photorealistic and artistic images — originally operated through Discord, now via a web interface as well.
AI modelsMistral AI
A European AI company with both open and commercial models — relevant where data sovereignty matters.
AI modelsModel Context Protocol (MCP)
MCP is an open standard that defines how AI applications connect to external tools and data sources.
MCP & protocolsMulti-agent system
Several specialised AI agents work together, in coordination, on one complex task.
AI agentsMultimodal AI
AI models that understand and produce several kinds of data together — text, image, audio and video.
LLMs & language modelsAgent orchestration
Coordinating several agents, steps and tools into one reliable overall process.
AI agentsClaude Opus
The most capable tier of Anthropic's Claude family, for complex reasoning and coding.
AI modelsOllama
A tool for running large language models locally on your own machine, with a simple command line and API.
Developers & APIsOpen-source LLM
Freely available, self-hostable language models as an alternative to proprietary AI APIs.
AI modelsOpenAI
The AI research company behind GPT, ChatGPT and DALL·E, which makes its models available through an API.
AI modelsPerformance marketing
A data-driven marketing approach in which budget is steered by measurable results such as clicks, leads or purchases.
Marketing & growthPerplexity
An AI answer engine that responds to searches with summarised, source-backed answers.
AI modelsPrompt chaining
A technique that splits a complex task into several sequential prompts, each output feeding the next step as input.
LLMs & language modelsPrompt engineering
Prompt engineering is the craft of phrasing AI instructions so that language models return better results.
LLMs & language modelsPrompt injection
A security risk where manipulated input overrides or redirects a language model's instructions.
Enterprise AIPrompt template
A reusable prompt template with placeholders and variables — a building block of robust LLM applications.
Developers & APIsMarketing ROI
A metric that relates the profit from a marketing activity to the cost invested in it.
Marketing & growthRAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation)
RAG combines a language model with the retrieval of relevant information from external knowledge sources before answering.
RAG & knowledgeReasoning model
A language model optimised for multi-step reasoning that thinks in steps before answering.
LLMs & language modelsReinforcement learning
Reinforcement learning lets an agent learn optimal behaviour through trial, error and reward.
AI fundamentalsReporting tools
Software for visualising and preparing data in dashboards and reports.
Analytics, tracking & reportingRetargeting
A form of advertising that deliberately re-engages previous website visitors to lead them to a conversion.
Marketing & growthRLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback)
RLHF is a training method that uses human feedback to make model responses more helpful and safer.
LLMs & language modelsROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
A metric that relates revenue to advertising spend and shows how efficient campaigns are.
Marketing & growthRPA (Robotic Process Automation)
Software robots automate rule-based, repetitive and structured tasks within existing systems.
AI automationSDK (Software Development Kit)
A collection of libraries, tools and documentation for developing on a platform.
Developers & APIsSegmentation
Dividing a heterogeneous market or customer base into homogeneous groups so that messages and measures can be targeted.
Marketing & growthSemantic search
Search by meaning rather than exact keywords — based on embeddings and vector search.
RAG & knowledgeSEO agent
An SEO agent is AI-powered software that analyses, plans and carries out search engine optimisation tasks on its own.
Marketing & growthSEO tools
Software for analysing, steering and improving a website's visibility in search engines.
Marketing & growthServer-side tracking
Server-side tracking processes data through your own server container rather than in the browser alone.
Analytics, tracking & reportingSession recording
Recordings of real user sessions — mouse, clicks and scrolling — that make behaviour on a website traceable.
Analytics, tracking & reportingSLM (Small Language Model)
A compact, resource-efficient language model that runs locally or cheaply, in contrast to a large LLM.
LLMs & language modelsSora
An AI video generator from OpenAI that creates short clips from text descriptions, making text-to-video accessible for marketing, content and prototyping.
AI modelsStable Diffusion
An open AI image model from Stability AI that creates images from text descriptions and can be freely adapted and run locally on your own hardware.
AI modelsSupervised learning
Supervised learning is machine learning with labelled training data, for classification and regression.
AI fundamentalsSynthetic data
Artificially generated data that replaces or supplements real datasets, used above all to train AI models.
AI fundamentalsSystem prompt
An overarching instruction that defines an AI assistant's role, behaviour, tone and rules.
LLMs & language modelsTag management
Tag management handles tracking codes centrally through a tag management system instead of in the source code.
Analytics, tracking & reportingTag management systems
Tools that manage tracking and marketing tags centrally, without having to change the website code for every adjustment.
Analytics, tracking & reportingTemperature (AI parameter)
A control parameter of a language model that sets how far word choice may deviate from the most likely option when generating text.
LLMs & language modelsToken
A token is the smallest unit a language model processes — the pieces text is broken into for processing.
LLMs & language modelsTokenisation
Splitting text into tokens as pre-processing for language models, which affects processing, cost and context length.
LLMs & language modelsTool use
An AI agent's ability to call external tools such as APIs, databases or search.
AI agentsTracking pixel
A tracking pixel is a tiny, usually invisible image whose retrieval reports a user action to a server, making tracking possible.
Analytics, tracking & reportingTransformer
The transformer is an AI architecture that captures relationships within text using the attention mechanism.
LLMs & language modelsWeb tracking tools
Web tracking tools record and analyse user behaviour — from Google Analytics 4 to Matomo and others.
Analytics, tracking & reportingWeb analytics
Collecting, measuring and analysing website data in order to improve content and conversions in a targeted way.
Analytics, tracking & reportingWebhook
An HTTP callback that automatically notifies another system in real time when an event occurs.
Developers & APIsWeb tracking
Web tracking records and evaluates how visitors behave on websites — page views, conversions and more.
Analytics, tracking & reportingWhisper
An open speech recognition model from OpenAI that turns spoken language into text, used for transcription, subtitles and voice interfaces.
AI models