Link building in AI search: a glossary

Link building is the practice of getting other websites to link to yours, historically in order to pass ranking authority and now, increasingly, in order to place accurate statements about your brand on pages that AI systems read.

A witness statement is this book's term for a link once the surrounding page is read rather than counted: the value sits in what the page says about you, not in the link itself.

Machine-read testimony is the body of statements about a brand that AI search systems actually read and weigh, as distinct from the links they were once assumed to count.

Corroboration is the agreement between independent sources on the same claim about an entity, and it is what raises a retrieval system's confidence that the claim is true.

A corroboration ledger is a running record of which independent sources assert which claims about an entity, kept so that link work can be measured as evidence gathered rather than as links acquired.

A semantic triple is a fact expressed as subject, predicate and object, such as 'Omnipressent publishes Link Building in the Era of AI Search Engines', which is the form machines extract facts in.

Entity development is the work of making a brand resolvable as one clearly defined thing, so that mentions of it accumulate onto a single record rather than scattering across several ambiguous ones.

An entity record is the set of attributes a search or AI system holds about a thing, assembled from every source it has read and used when the system needs to say what that thing is.

Anchor text is the visible clickable text of a link, historically engineered to contain a target keyword because search engines used it as a relevance signal.

Surrounding content is the text on a third-party page around a mention of your brand, which determines what a machine reading that page learns about you.

A brand mention is any reference to a brand on a third-party page, whether or not it carries a link.

A guest post is an article published on someone else's site under your byline or containing a link to you, most often bought as a link placement rather than commissioned editorially.

An entity home is the single page on a business's own site that states the complete, canonical picture of what it is, marked up so machines read facts rather than infer them.

A brand sheet is a one-page document holding a business's canonical facts in their exact agreed wording, handed to every third party that will describe it.