Plain-English glossary.

The practice of structuring content so it is retrievable by AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews). Distinct from traditional SEO in that the target is citation in a generated answer, not a ranked blue link. Core techniques: clean JSON-LD, question-answer formatted content, high factual density per paragraph.

A 0-100 score measuring how findable a specific business is to AI answer engines. Inputs include schema.org markup depth (20%), llms-full.txt presence (15%), robots.txt posture toward AI crawlers (15%), citation frequency across ChatGPT/Perplexity/Claude/Google AI Overviews (20%), content structure (15%), and site speed + crawlability (15%). Category median is 43. Top decile is 72+. See methodology →

Operator's paid tier. Deploys five AI agents (Kai, Reply, Chase, Scout, Route, plus Pickup) that run the non-craft operations of a local business. Replaces a part-time office manager plus an outside marketing vendor.

A 0-100 composite score computed nightly from six components: Reviews (25%), Market Rank (20%), Financial Health (20%), Response Rate (15%), Jobs Flow (10%), and Kai Activity (10%). Operator's primary measure of how a local business is performing. Think of it as Oura ring, but for a business. Full methodology →

One of the five Autopilot agents. Follows up on quotes that went quiet, re-engages old leads at well-chosen intervals, and chases overdue invoices. Polite, persistent, context-aware. Never spammy. If a customer said "not this month," Chase will quietly check back next month rather than push.

The process by which a business owner verifies ownership of their Operator profile. Claiming is free, unlocks Business Health Score component breakdown, allows edits to hours, services, service area, and photos, and is required to connect Autopilot. Claim status does not affect rank.

Operator's pattern of surfacing the Autopilot upgrade prompt only after the user has demonstrably outgrown the free tier. Typically triggers at weeks 6-8 when saved markets exceed a threshold, when leaderboard check frequency hits daily, or when the user starts manually copying data out. The opposite of upsell-at-signup.

Heavily overlapping with AEO. The practice of making content maximally usable by generative AI systems as source material. Emphasizes machine-readable structure (schema.org, llms.txt, clean JSON-LD, factual density) and crawler-friendly policies. Where AEO focuses on retrieval, GEO focuses on generation input quality.

The preferred syntax for embedding schema.org markup in HTML pages. Sits in a <script type="application/ld+json"> block in the head. Every Operator page ships at minimum a BreadcrumbList + primary entity JSON-LD block. Business pages add LocalBusiness + AggregateRating.

The lead Autopilot agent. Writes the 6am daily brief (under 100 words) by pattern-matching across reviews, calls, jobs, weather, competitor moves, and market shifts. The first thing a business owner reads every morning. 18 hours saved per week on average, 92% action rate on brief recommendations.

A proposed file format at the root of a website that provides a machine-readable overview of the site's contents, formatted for LLM consumption. Operator publishes llms-full.txt per market at operator.fyi/api/llms-txt?niche=hvac&city=honolulu and a top-level operator.fyi/llms-full.txt. Maintaining a clean llms.txt is a direct input to AI Visibility score.

A business that serves customers in a defined geographic area, typically within a single metro or county. Operator covers all US local businesses where the primary service is local: home services (HVAC, plumbing, electrical), medical and dental, food and beverage, retail, professional services, fitness, beauty, and more. Excludes pure e-commerce.

A business's integer position within a specific (city, category) market, ordered by market share score. Rank 1 of 32 means this is the top-performing operator among 32 HVAC contractors in Honolulu. Exposed as market_rank and market_total on every directory row.

A 0 to 1 estimate of the fraction of local demand a business captures in its market. Computed from review volume, rating, review velocity, and response rate, normalized against competitors in the same (city, category). The primary sort key for market rank. 0.22 share means this business captures an estimated 22% of category demand in this city.

An open protocol by Anthropic for LLMs to call external tools and data sources. Operator's MCP server at operator.fyi/api/mcp exposes 9 tools that let AI agents query business data, get price estimates, check availability, and book jobs. Live since April 2, 2026. Developer docs →

The degree to which a business's Name, Address, and Phone match across Google Business Profile, Overture Maps, the business's own website, and state registries. A classic local SEO signal that still matters. Inconsistent NAP is a direct drag on both Google local pack rank and AI Visibility.

Operator's estimated annual revenue for a specific business, expressed as a low/mid/high range. Derived from category + zip code revenue bands, operating years, employment signals from job postings, tech stack sophistication, and property footprint. Not disclosed revenue. Median absolute error is approximately 32% against a 4,200-business audit set. Good for relative comparisons within a market, not for precise valuation.

An open-source mapping foundation producing geographic data under CDLA Permissive 2.0. Operator uses Overture's Places layer (50M+ POIs) as the base layer for the business directory. Overture releases updated data monthly. Backed by AWS, Meta, Microsoft, TomTom.

One of the five Autopilot agents. Answers inbound calls after-hours, on weekends, and when lines are busy. Qualifies the lead, books the appointment on the business's calendar, and texts the caller a confirmation. Named for "picking up the phone." Handles roughly one in three missed calls that would otherwise be lost revenue.

The practice of generating large numbers of SEO-targeted pages from a single template plus a structured data source. Operator's /hvac/honolulu/ pattern is pSEO: one template, tens of thousands of (trade, city) combinations, each ranking for its specific query. Works well when the data is genuinely useful per-page, not thin.

One of the five Autopilot agents. Writes owner responses to every Google review within minutes of the review posting. Personalized (references specific service, name, date when available). Never templated. Closes the response rate gap that costs many businesses rank in both Google and AI Visibility.

The percentage of Google reviews in the trailing 180 days that received an owner response. A proxy for operational diligence. Category median is around 34%. Top decile is 90%+. A 15% weight in Business Health Score. The single easiest score component to move if you commit to it.

The rate at which a business accumulates new reviews, measured as reviews per 90 days. A high velocity relative to category baseline indicates growth and recency. Used as an input to the Reviews component of Business Health Score. A 5.0 rating with 0 new reviews in 90 days is a worse signal than 4.7 with 34 new reviews.

One of the five Autopilot agents. Optimizes the day's job route for field service businesses. Factors in traffic, job priority, technician skill match, stop density, and customer time windows. Saves an estimated 40 minutes per technician per day on typical HVAC or plumbing routes.

A collaborative, community-driven vocabulary for structured data markup on web pages. LocalBusiness, HVACBusiness, AggregateRating, BreadcrumbList, FAQPage, and DefinedTerm are among the most common schemas used on Operator. Strong schema markup is a 20% weight in AI Visibility score.

One of the five Autopilot agents. Monitors the competitive landscape within your market. Flags changes in competitor pricing, ratings, staffing (from job postings), and service additions. Writes a weekly market intel brief. Named for reconnaissance.

The list of cities a business will travel to for service. Stored as service_area_cities array on every directory_businesses row. A business appears in the leaderboard for every city in its service area, not just its home city. Example: a Kapolei-based HVAC contractor servicing Honolulu + Waipahu + Ewa Beach appears in all four leaderboards.

The estimated total annual revenue available to all businesses in a specific (city, category) market. Computed from business count, category revenue bands, population, and regional cost multipliers. Example: HVAC in Honolulu has a TAM of approximately $14.2M. Published per market on the leaderboard pages.

A Google review that received no owner response within 30 days of posting. A high unanswered count signals either a disengaged operator or insufficient response infrastructure. Directly drags on response rate, Business Health Score, and AI Visibility. Honolulu alone has 41,200 unanswered reviews worth an estimated $180M in captured demand. The Reply agent auto-handles these.

A go-to-market principle: acquire customers at zero paid customer acquisition cost. Operator's growth comes from programmatic SEO, MCP directory submissions, owner-led claim flows, and AEO citations, not paid ads. A deliberate constraint that forces product quality over paid reach.