Guides / Glossary

WooCommerce SEO & Product Discovery Glossary

Plain-English definitions of the structured data, product feed, and AI discovery terms that come up across these guides. Linkable per-term for quick reference.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)

Structuring your content and catalog so AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — can find, understand, trust, and cite it. See the AEO guide.

Structured data

Machine-readable markup that describes a page’s content in a standardized vocabulary (usually Schema.org) so search engines and AI can extract facts rather than guess from prose.

JSON-LD

JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data — a JSON-based way to embed structured data in a page. It’s Google’s recommended format and the one used throughout these guides.

Product schema

Schema.org Product structured data describing a product’s name, image, description, price, availability, brand, identifiers, and ratings. See the Product schema guide.

GTIN

Global Trade Item Number — the standardized barcode number for a product. UPC, EAN, and ISBN are all GTIN formats. See identifiers.

MPN

Manufacturer Part Number — the maker’s own identifier for a product. Used together with brand when a product has no GTIN.

Rich results

Enhanced search listings — showing price, star ratings, availability, and more — that Google generates from valid structured data.

Product feed

A structured list of products and their attributes (id, title, price, availability, identifiers) submitted to shopping channels. See the Merchant feed guide.

Google Merchant Center

Google’s platform for managing the product data that powers Shopping ads and free product listings, fed by a product feed.

llms.txt

A plain-text file at a site’s root that points AI agents to its most important machine-readable content. See what is llms.txt.

ProductGroup

A Schema.org type representing a product that has multiple purchasable variants (such as size and color), each a Product linked by a shared productGroupID. See variable products.

Canonical URL

The preferred version of a page, declared with rel="canonical", used to consolidate duplicate or variant URLs onto a single address.

Crawlability

How easily search engines and AI crawlers can reach and read a site’s content. Server-rendered HTML, clean URLs, and a permissive robots.txt all improve it.

REST API

An authenticated programmatic interface for managing store data. WooCommerce’s REST API is built for integration and management, not public discovery. See REST API vs. public endpoints.

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