Ad-Tech Glossary
Acceptable Ads Program
The Acceptable Ads program lets ads meeting non-intrusiveness criteria load automatically through participating ad blockers, in exchange for meeting published standards.
ad tech glossary
Ad-Tech Glossary
llms.txt
llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file at a site's root that gives AI crawlers and assistants a curated map of the most important pages to read and cite.
Ad-Tech Glossary
What Is a Smartlink in Affiliate Marketing?
A smartlink automatically routes each visitor to the best-matching offer from a pre-set group, instead of one single fixed affiliate link.
Ad-Tech Glossary
What Are Dark Patterns in Advertising?
Dark patterns are manipulative ad and landing-page tactics, fake urgency, disguised buttons, hidden costs, designed to trick visitors into converting.
Ad-Tech Glossary
What Is a Content Farm?
A content farm publishes large volumes of cheap, low-effort articles purely to capture traffic and ad revenue, not to serve readers well.
Ad-Tech Glossary
What Is Ad Refresh?
Ad refresh reloads a new ad into the same slot while a visitor stays on the page, generating extra impressions without a full page reload.
Ad-Tech Glossary
What Is Prebid (Prebid.js)?
Prebid.js is the leading open-source header bidding wrapper, letting publishers run one unified auction across multiple ad exchanges at once.
Ad-Tech Glossary
Signal Loss (Advertising)
Signal loss is the gradual decline in the tracking, targeting, and attribution data available to advertisers, driven by cookie restrictions, app-tracking permissions, ad blockers, and privacy regulation.
Ad-Tech Glossary
Identity Graph
An identity graph is a database that links multiple identifiers, such as device IDs, hashed emails, and cookies, back to a single representation of a person or household for targeting and measurement.
Ad-Tech Glossary
Cookieless Targeting
Cookieless targeting is an umbrella term for any ad targeting method that avoids relying on third-party cookies, using approaches like contextual signals, first-party data, or consented identifiers instead.
Ad-Tech Glossary
Zero-Party Data
Zero-party data is information a customer deliberately and proactively shares with a brand, such as stated preferences or purchase intent, as distinct from data inferred purely from their behavior.
Ad-Tech Glossary
Unified ID 2.0 (UID2)
Unified ID 2.0 (UID2) is an open-source identity solution built from a hashed and encrypted email or phone number, used across publishers and advertisers as an alternative to third-party cookies.
Ad-Tech Glossary
TCF Consent String
A TCF consent string is a compact, encoded record of what a user agreed to under IAB Europe's Transparency and Consent Framework, passed along the ad supply chain with every bid request.
Ad-Tech Glossary
Topics API
The Topics API is a Chrome-based Privacy Sandbox feature that infers a handful of broad interest categories from recent browsing and shares them with sites, without a cross-site identifier.
Ad-Tech Glossary
Brand Impersonation (Ads)
Brand impersonation is when a scam advertiser mimics a real brand's name, logo, trademarks or a fake celebrity endorsement to trick people into clicking a fraudulent offer.
Ad-Tech Glossary
Malvertising
Malvertising is malicious advertising, embedding malware, scam redirects, or exploit code inside an ordinary-looking ad so that clicking it can compromise a device or funnel someone into a scam.
Ad-Tech Glossary
Ad Blocker
An ad blocker is browser software that detects and prevents ads from loading, using filter lists that match known ad domains, scripts and DOM patterns.
Ad-Tech Glossary
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is structuring content to directly answer a question so it gets pulled into a featured snippet, voice response, or AI answer instead of requiring a click-through.
Ad-Tech Glossary
What Is a Chumbox?
A chumbox is the grid of thumbnail ads, often labeled 'Around the Web,' served by native content-discovery platforms across the open web.
Ad-Tech Glossary
What Is AI Slop in Advertising and Content?
AI slop is generic, unedited AI-generated content or ad creative published at volume to capture traffic, not to genuinely inform or persuade.
Ad-Tech Glossary
What Is Brand Suitability in Advertising?
Brand suitability goes beyond brand safety: it matches ad placement to a specific brand's values and audience, not just universal harm avoidance.
Ad-Tech Glossary
Device Fingerprinting
Device fingerprinting identifies or tracks a device by combining technical signals such as browser version, operating system, screen resolution, and installed fonts, rather than storing a cookie.
Ad-Tech Glossary
Data Clean Room
A data clean room is a secure environment where two or more parties can match and analyze combined data sets for advertising insight, without either side exposing raw, identifiable records to the other.
Ad-Tech Glossary
Consent Management Platform (CMP)
A consent management platform (CMP) is the software that shows a cookie or privacy banner, records what a user agreed to, and communicates that choice to every ad tech vendor on the page.
Ad-Tech Glossary
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is a label for efforts to make content easier for AI systems like ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews to find and cite, not just rank in a list of links. No tactic guarantees a citation.
Ad-Tech Glossary
What Are Made-for-Advertising (MFA) Sites?
MFA sites are built to generate ad revenue rather than serve readers, typically thin on content and heavy on ad units and cheap paid traffic.