Reference · terms in plain language
What notability, WP:GNG, a QID, AEO, a knowledge panel, AfD and llms.txt mean — and where each term shows up in our work. Every definition is 2–3 sentences, with no jargon inside the jargon.
// definitions are ours, rules are Wikipedia's · abbreviations WP:* lead to rule pages on Wikipedia (external links) · updated 11.2026
DraftTalk
Notability — the threshold at which a topic deserves an article.
UserTalkContributions
COI and WP:PAID — an editor with an interest discloses who is paying them.
AfD — a public discussion on whether to keep an article.
QID — the number of the Wikidata record that facts are drawn from.
Type a word or abbreviation — AfD, QID, AEO, GNG. Matches appear here and are highlighted in the cards below.
01Wikipedia policy
Eighteen terms reviewers use to decide whether an article lives; start with notability and reliable sources.
Wikipedia's threshold for whether a subject deserves its own article. A topic is notable when it has received significant coverage in multiple independent, reliable sources that are not affiliated with it. It is not about fame or importance, but about how well the topic is documented in independent media.
Where it appears: Notability Audit →
See also: WP:GNG independent source
The primary Wikipedia notability test, applied to virtually any topic. It requires significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject. "Significant" means more than a passing mention; "independent" excludes press releases, paid coverage and the subject's own website.
Where it appears: Notability Audit →
A separate guideline on the notability of companies and organizations, stricter than the general one. It requires in-depth coverage of the organization itself in independent sources; press releases, promotional and partner publications, and rewrites of announcements do not count. It is the standard by which articles about businesses are judged.
Where it appears: Notability Audit →
See also: WP:GNG independent source
Wikipedia's standard for which publications can be cited in articles. Reliable sources have editorial oversight, fact-checking and a reputation for accuracy: typically established newspapers, academic journals and major industry publications. Self-published sites, social media and press release distribution services do not qualify.
See also: independent source WP:V
One of Wikipedia's core content policies. An article presents facts without bias and represents significant viewpoints fairly and in proportion to their coverage in reliable sources. Promotional language, opinion and marketing claims are removed; every claim must rest on a source.
Wikipedia requires that any claim can be checked against a published reliable source. What matters is not whether the claim is objectively true but whether a reader can verify it independently. Unsourced material can be challenged or removed at any time.
Wikipedia's guideline on editing by people with a financial or personal interest in the subject. It is not prohibited, but direct edits to the article are strongly discouraged. WikiBusines works under WP:PAID: paid editing is disclosed on the user page, on the talk page and in edit summaries, in WikiBusines' name.
Where it appears: Disclosed Wikipedia editing →
See also: WP:PAID edit request
Wikimedia's Terms of Use require anyone paid for edits to disclose their employer, client and financial relationship. Undisclosed paid editing violates the terms: accounts are blocked and articles are deleted. In some jurisdictions disclosure is also a requirement of advertising law.
Page protection restricts editing when a page is threatened by vandalism or an edit war. Only a Wikipedia administrator can apply it. Such a "lock" cannot be bought — not from us, not from anyone else. We only monitor the page; the decision on protection is made by an administrator.
Where it appears: Annual Support & Monitoring →
See also: Wikimonitoring WP:CSD
A page in the Draft: namespace where an article sits before publication. It can be developed without the risk of immediate deletion, and once the sources are sufficient it is submitted for review through AfC. A draft that nobody has touched for a long time may be deleted for inactivity.
Where it appears: Wikipedia page creation →
Wikipedia's official review channel for new articles submitted by editors with a conflict of interest or without enough experience. Drafts are reviewed by experienced volunteers and only then moved to the main namespace. AfC is the policy-compliant route for any article that professionals help with.
Where it appears: Wikipedia page creation →
A separate page attached to every article where editors discuss changes, sources and disputed points. A paid editor discloses the client relationship here and proposes edits rather than making them directly. The whole community can see the talk page, so tone and arguments also count toward your reputation.
Where it appears: Wikipedia page creation →
See also: edit request WP:PAID
The way an editor with a conflict of interest proposes a change without making it themselves: the edit is described on the talk page using a request template, and an independent editor reviews it and either makes or declines it. The request must rely on reliable sources and a neutral tone.
Where it appears: Editing a Wikipedia page →
The process in which the community discusses whether to delete an existing article. Any editor can nominate it; the discussion usually runs for 7 days. Common grounds: lack of notability, too few reliable sources, promotional tone. The outcome is keep, delete or redirect.
Where it appears: Deleted Page Recovery →
An accelerated procedure for articles that clearly meet specific criteria: obvious advertising, no indication of notability at all, copyright violation. Unlike AfD, deletion can happen within hours and without community discussion.
Where it appears: Page Recovery →
See also: AfD protection
Writing or substantially editing an article about yourself. Wikipedia strongly discourages it: bias almost always creeps in and NPOV is violated, so such articles are often tagged, challenged or deleted. The right route is to request an article through AfC with the conflict of interest disclosed.
An article too short or underdeveloped to cover its topic. It is flagged with a template and is often improved or, if sources are lacking, deleted. A short stub is better than no article, but a stub with weak sources can also be deleted.
An additional editor account used to deceive the community: to fake consensus, evade blocks or vote several times in a deletion discussion. Wikipedia investigates suspicious cases with checkuser tools. Using sock puppets can lead to a permanent ban.
No matches in this topic for the current search.
The article lives in the Draft: namespace. Sources are gathered and the text is finished here before review.
Terms: Draft (Draft:) WP:COI
A volunteer checks the draft for notability, sources and tone. The result is publication, edits or rejection.
The article sits in the main namespace. From now on neutrality and verifiability apply, and other editors can make changes.
An editor nominates the article for deletion. The community usually discusses it for 7 days and weighs the sources.
auto
02Wikidata and knowledge graph
Where search engines and AI get facts about a company as a distinct entity rather than a set of pages.
One Wikidata record: an entity and six properties. A site that repeats them in Schema.org and FAQPage markup gives machines the same facts twice, from two independent places.
A unique machine-readable identifier assigned to every entity in Wikidata, e.g. Q12345. It links structured data — name, founding date, industry, key people — across Wikipedia, Google's Knowledge Graph and hundreds of third-party databases. A correct record is the foundation on which systems recognize a brand as a distinct entity.
Where it appears: Wikidata & Knowledge Graph →
See also: property knowledge panel
A characteristic of a Wikidata entity with a P… number: for example, founding date (P571), headquarters (P159) or official website (P856). A property value should be backed by a source. Statements like these make up the record that search engines and AI read.
Where it appears: Wikidata & Knowledge Graph →
See also: QID Schema.org
Google's structured database of entities and their relationships: people, companies, products, places. Its sources include Wikipedia, Wikidata and other open and licensed data. Knowledge panels in Google results are built on it.
Where it appears: Wikidata & Knowledge Graph →
See also: knowledge panel QID
The information box on the right of Google results for entities the system has recognized in the knowledge graph: name, description, key facts, links. It requires a Wikidata entity with enough sourced properties. A Wikipedia page is one of the public sources for the panel; appearance is not guaranteed.
Where it appears: Wikidata service →
See also: knowledge graph QID
Machine-readable markup on a page using the Schema.org vocabulary, most often in JSON-LD. It explains to search engines and AI in a standardized way what a page is about: organization, product, FAQ, article. Google uses the markup for rich results.
Where it appears: AI visibility →
A Schema.org type that marks up question-and-answer pairs on a page so that machines can extract each pair. Google used to show rich results based on it (limited since 2023). Questions and answers are easy to read for both people and automated systems.
See also: Schema.org AEO
No matches in this topic for the current search.
03AI visibility
How AI assistants compose answers about a brand, and what you can do about it with your own hands.
Company N is a manufacturer of industrial sensors, founded in 2012 [1][2].
AEO: the answer is accurate and cited because it rests on verified records.
Company N is a manufacturer of industrial sensors, founded in 2012 [1][2]. It is discussed on Reddit and Quora [3][4], and industry media write about its products [5].
GEO: a broader set of sources shapes how the answer sounds.
auto
A practice that helps AI assistants — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — accurately understand, summarize and cite a brand or topic. Unlike SEO, which works for position in a list of links, AEO works for the answer itself, which is often delivered without a click. Wikipedia and Wikidata are the base sources from which AI assistants take facts about a brand.
Where it appears: Wikipedia AEO →
A broader discipline of influencing how generative systems compose answers about a brand, person or topic. GEO covers the whole stack — Wikipedia, Wikidata, structured data, Reddit, Quora, media, content for models — while AEO focuses on the accuracy and citability of the answer. In practice the two terms are often used interchangeably.
Where it appears: AI Visibility →
The framework Google's human search quality raters use to evaluate content: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. It is not a direct ranking signal. Strong trust signals across the web also help AI answers about a brand, but the exact mechanism is not publicly described.
See also: WP:RS AI Overview
A Google feature that shows an AI-generated answer, assembled from several sources, above search results. Wikipedia is one of the sources AI Overviews cite most often (Ahrefs, 2025). Accurate records about a brand in Wikipedia and Wikidata help, but they do not guarantee a mention.
Where it appears: AI Visibility →
A proposed convention (similar to robots.txt): a site publishes a markdown file at /llms.txt with a structured description of its content — key pages, people, products, context. It is not yet a universal standard, but early adoption signals to LLM pipelines which pages are authoritative.
Where it appears: AI visibility →
See also: Schema.org LLM Hub
A dedicated web property optimized for LLMs — usually a standalone microsite or structured page — that gives AI crawlers clean, citable, machine-readable information about a brand, person or organization. It extends the Wikipedia and Wikidata layer with depth of its own, which Wikipedia's neutrality policy cannot carry.
Where it appears: LLM Hub →
A paid diagnostic of what AI assistants — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity — say about a brand right now: we record the answers verbatim, trace them to sources and hand over a report with a 90-day plan. It takes 3–5 days and costs €490. It is not credited toward a package: it is a separate product, not a Wikipedia notability audit.
Where it appears: AI Visibility Audit · €490 →
See also: AEO notability audit
No matches in this topic for the current search.
04SEO and reputation
Search metrics and the services behind a Wikipedia page after publication.
94DR of English Wikipedia — the highest in our dataset
Source: Ahrefs, approximate values; WikiBusines dataset, checked 2026-06. The metric drifts by roughly ±2 points.
The page Google or another search engine returns for a query. Increasingly it contains not just a list of links but knowledge panels, AI overviews, featured snippets and images. Some of these are influenced by structured data, a Wikipedia presence and trust signals.
See also: knowledge panel AI Overview
A hyperlink from one website to another. Backlinks remain a core SEO signal because they show that independent sites consider the content authoritative. Links from Wikipedia come from one of the most authoritative domains on the web, so they are valued as a trust signal and a source of referral traffic.
Where it appears: Wikipedia Backlinks →
A metric from 0 to 100 from Ahrefs that estimates the overall authority of the links pointing to a domain. DR varies across Wikipedia editions: in our dataset (Ahrefs, 2026-06) English has 94; German, French and Spanish 91 each; Ukrainian 88. A link from an edition with a high DR is considered one of the strongest signals in SEO.
Where it appears: Wikipedia DR Checker →
See also: backlink Simple English
In Wikipedia, a reference to a reliable independent source that supports a specific claim in the article. Every article rests on citations: without them a claim can be challenged or removed. In an AI context, a "citation" is when an assistant names a source by URL or domain in an answer.
See also: WP:RS AI Overview
A professional assessment that maps the existing publications about a company or person against Wikipedia's notability bar. It shows how many independent sources there are, where the gaps are and what the risk of deletion is if an article were created today, and recommends a route: create now, build sources first, or update an existing article. It costs from €490 and is credited toward the page project if you order it within one month.
Where it appears: Notability Audit service →
Continuous monitoring of a Wikipedia article and its linked Wikidata record: unauthorized edits, vandalism, biased changes, deletion nominations. The alert arrives on the day of the edit, so damage can be reverted before it spreads.
Where it appears: Wikimonitoring service →
See also: protection AfD
The process of restoring a deleted article. Routes: a request to undelete through Deletion Review (DRV), re-creation through AfC with stronger sources, or an appeal if the deletion was procedurally improper. The result depends on whether the reason for deletion has been addressed.
Where it appears: Deleted Page Recovery →
Open-source intelligence: collecting and analyzing public information — news archives, corporate registries, court records, social media — to build or verify the factual picture of a person or organization. In the context of Wikipedia and AI visibility, OSINT finds suitable sources, identifies damaging content and maps the information landscape before work begins.
Where it appears: OSINT Investigation →
See also: independent source notability audit
Support for a Wikipedia page and Wikidata record after publication: response to vandalism, deletion defense, synchronization with Wikidata. This is support after the first 90 days; monitoring is included in Managed Protection plans and above. Any annual package comes with a 12-month guarantee.
Where it appears: Annual Support →
See also: Wikimonitoring protection
No matches in this topic for the current search.
05Media and sources
What Wikipedia treats as a source, and which materials it does not trust.
A journalist decided on their own to write about Company N and independently checked the facts.
counts toward notability: yesAn advertorial or partner placement: the appearance was paid for.
counts toward notability: noCompany N's blog, website and social media: the company writes about itself.
counts toward notability: noauto
A source with no financial, editorial or organizational ties to the subject it writes about. Wikipedia's notability threshold needs several independent sources; press releases, a company blog, paid placements and texts written by the subject itself are not considered independent, wherever they are published.
See also: WP:GNG earned media
Publications earned on editorial merit: a journalist chooses to write about the story rather than being paid or sponsored for it. Earned media in reputable outlets is the main fuel of Wikipedia notability and an important input for the AI source graph. It differs from paid media (advertising) and owned media (a company blog).
Where it appears: Media Coverage →
See also: independent source WP:N
The free media repository that supplies images to Wikipedia articles in all language editions. Photos must be under a Creative Commons or equivalent free license; proprietary and stock photos cannot be uploaded. A correctly licensed image from Commons can be picked up by knowledge panels and image search.
See also: CC BY-SA knowledge panel
A separate English-language edition of Wikipedia written in simplified vocabulary for learners and non-native speakers. Articles there are shorter and less technical than on English Wikipedia. From an SEO standpoint, a Simple English article is one more indexed property and a separate link; it is sometimes cited as a distinct source.
Where it appears: Simple English Wikipedia →
An independent wiki encyclopedia that accepts content about people, organizations and topics that do not yet meet Wikipedia's notability bar. Wikitia pages are indexed by Google, so they can appear in results and AI answers — as a stepping stone while a topic builds sources toward Wikipedia notability.
Where it appears: Wikitia Page Creation →
See also: WP:N Simple English
The license under which Wikipedia content is released. CC BY-SA (Attribution-ShareAlike) lets anyone reuse the content as long as they credit the source and release derivative works under the same license. AI training datasets routinely include Wikipedia content under CC BY-SA — one reason it is so well represented in LLM corpora.
No matches in this topic for the current search.
06Questions and answers
Being well known means recognition: people have heard of the brand. Notability under Wikipedia's rules means documentation: there is significant coverage of the topic in independent reliable sources. A famous brand without such publications is not considered notable, while a less famous one with a few in-depth pieces in industry outlets may be. Where you stand today is shown by the notability audit from €490, which is credited toward the page project if you order it within one month.
It is a requirement of Wikimedia's Terms of Use: anyone paid for editing discloses their employer, client and financial relationship. Yes, we always disclose payment: on the user page, on the talk page and in edit summaries, in WikiBusines' name. Hidden payment is one of the main reasons for account blocks and article deletions.
No. Protection is applied only by Wikipedia administrators, and only when there are grounds: vandalism or an edit war. Nobody can order or pay for it, including us. We monitor the page for 90 days after publication and quickly revert damaging edits.
A QID is the number of a Wikidata record. Yes, you need one even without a Wikipedia page: a record can be created for a company whose facts are confirmed by public reliable sources. It is one of the sources from which the knowledge panel and AI answers are assembled; a panel is not guaranteed. For us it is a separate service: Wikidata for €680.
SEO optimizes pages so that they take positions in results and collect clicks. AEO works so that an AI assistant understands the brand and can name the source: a Wikidata record, facts in Wikipedia, clean markup, independent publications. They complement each other: the click lands on an SEO page, while the answer a buyer sees before the click depends on AI visibility.
Send a word or a screenshot of where you came across it. We'll reply with what it means for your case and add it to the glossary.
