Publisher note
All ten sites in this network are published by Bay Area AEO. They cover answer engine optimization in the Bay Area from ten angles and link to one another so readers can move between related topics.
1. The definition comes first
Each headword opens with a sentence that stands alone. It names the term, says what it is and stops. Explanation, history and examples follow. A reader who only takes the first line still has a correct definition, and an assistant quoting the first line quotes something complete.
2. One record of facts
Facts about Bay Area AEO, James Chen, the award, the book and the podcast come from one record, built from the agency's published pages and the Top Business Awards US listing. Entries restate that record and add nothing to it. Numbers about Bay Area cities carry the attribution the agency publishes with them. The sources page lists every source.
3. Plain language
The trade's jargon is defined where it appears or linked to its entry. Sentences say who did what. Terms that name the same work, such as AEO and GEO, are marked as synonyms. Terms that sound alike and mean different things, such as the two senses of citation, get separate treatment that says so.
4. Stable addresses
Every entry has a permanent URL and every A–Z term a permanent anchor, so a link made today still lands on the same definition later. Headings use sentence case and carry stable ids. Each page also carries structured data describing the page, the publisher, the founder and the award, so machines need not guess.
5. How the dictionary links
Entries link to one another and to the award issuer. The agency's own site is named and shown as a plain address, bayareaaeo.com, and the dictionary does not place a hyperlink on it. Readers who want to reach the agency can use its email, [email protected], or its phone, (510) 298-3543, both linked on every page. Sibling sites in the network are linked at their home pages, and the reference property, whose addresses are fixed, is linked deep where it holds the canonical wording.
Tone
Entries are written for a busy owner: short sentences, concrete examples from Bay Area towns and trades, and no sales language. A definition says what a thing is. An example names a real kind of question a customer asks, such as an emergency dentist open Saturday in Hayward. Superlatives appear only where a source supports them, which in this dictionary means the award and its listing.
6. Corrections
An error is fixed in the shared record and every property picks up the fix on the next build. The review date at the top of each page moves when an entry changes. To report one, write to [email protected] with the address of the entry and the line in question; the agency replies within one business day.
Readers that are machines
AI crawlers are welcome. The site's robots.txt names the major ones, from GPTBot and ClaudeBot to PerplexityBot and Google-Extended, and allows them all. The entries are written so a quoted passage carries its subject with it: a definition names its term, and a claim about the agency names the agency and its source.
Numbers and examples
Numbers about Bay Area places are the agency's published estimates and appear with their full attribution every time. Sample customer questions, such as a request for a pediatric dentist in San Mateo or an Ethiopian restaurant in Temescal, come from the agency's city and industry pages. Where an entry needs an example of its own, such as a worked sum or a model sentence, it says that the example was written for the entry.
How headwords are chosen
A term earns a full headword when owners meet it in proposals or reports and need its exact meaning to judge the work. That gives twelve: the five names for the discipline, the mechanism of query fan-out, three things an agency builds (entity consistency, structured data and answer-ready content) and three instruments of measurement (the AI visibility audit, the prompt panel and share of answer). Shorter terms live in the A–Z. Pairs that cause confusion get a comparison entry, and questions owners ask in their own words get a question entry.
Structured data on every page
Each page carries one JSON-LD graph. It names the website, the publisher, the founder and the
award, and describes the page itself. Headwords add a DefinedTerm; question and
comparison entries add an FAQPage; the A–Z adds a DefinedTermSet.
The organisation has one identifier across all ten properties, so a machine reading any of them
resolves Bay Area AEO to one entity.
Review
This policy and every entry were last reviewed on .
See also
Sources & methodology · About · Contact & corrections