A small agency just published a glossary. Normally that’s a shrug. This one is worth two minutes of your attention, because of what it says about the state of the market.
Boomcycle Digital Marketing, a San Ramon, California shop founded in 2003, has released a free Digital Marketing Glossary aimed squarely at the AI search era. It defines 28 terms across six categories and was written by founder and CEO David Victor as an open reference, according to the announcement dated September 8, 2026.
What’s actually in it
The six buckets are Search Engine Optimization, Local Search and Google Business Profile, Paid Search and Google Ads, Generative Engine Optimization and AI Search, Web Design and Performance, and Marketing Strategy and Attribution.
The entries mix the familiar with the brand new:
- Old guard: Technical SEO, Link Building, Conversion Tracking
- New guard: AI Overviews, Semantic Triple, Schema Markup, llms.txt
One detail buried in the release is the most instructive part for practitioners: the page was published using DefinedTermSet structured data, a schema type that helps search engines and AI systems parse definitions correctly. In other words, the glossary is itself a demonstration of the thing it’s teaching. That’s the move.
Why this matters for growth teams
Victor’s framing is blunt and, honestly, accurate. He said business owners are being asked to make decisions about AI search and generative engine optimization while the vocabulary is still being defined, and that the glossary exists to remove that barrier.
If you sell marketing services, that sentence is your pipeline problem in one line. Clients cannot approve budget for a discipline they cannot name. Every hour your account team spends explaining what an AI Overview is, is an hour not spent selling the work.
The agency also points to an earlier milestone: in May 2026 it documented 43 verified citations in AI search responses across Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT, tied to its generative engine optimization work. Citation counting as a KPI is still immature, but it is a reminder that “were we mentioned?” is becoming a reportable metric alongside rankings and clicks.
Generative engine optimization, defined
Per the release, generative engine optimization, also called GEO or LLMO, is about structuring and presenting content so it can surface inside AI-generated answers. It’s the newest category in the glossary and reflects how much of search behaviour now ends in a synthesized response rather than a list of blue links.
The practical translation: your content needs to be machine-legible before it can be machine-quotable. Clean entity relationships, structured data, unambiguous definitions, crawlable answers.
Steal the play, not the PDF
The real takeaway isn’t “go read someone else’s glossary.” It’s that a definitional content asset is one of the cheapest, most defensible GEO plays available right now. Here’s how to run it:
- Own your category’s vocabulary. Build a glossary for the terms your buyers actually search and mispronounce. Twenty to thirty entries is enough to start.
- Mark it up. DefinedTermSet and Schema Markup give AI systems an unambiguous read on what each term means and who said it.
- Write in plain language. LLMs quote clean, self-contained sentences. Jargon-stuffed definitions rarely get lifted into an answer.
- Keep it free and ungated. A gated glossary is invisible to the systems you’re trying to influence.
- Update it quarterly. Terms like llms.txt did not exist a couple of years ago. Stale definitions age fast.
- Track citations, not just traffic. Spot-check whether your definitions appear in AI Overviews and chatbot answers.
The wider point
Victor argued that open educational resources matter most during periods of transition, noting the search landscape has run through several major shifts since 2003 and each one created confusion before clarity.
That’s the arbitrage. Whoever defines the vocabulary of a new discipline tends to get cited as the authority on it, by humans and by models. Right now that land is still cheap.
Source: The Des Moines Register
