Glossary

Anchor text is the clickable words of a link. Search engines read it as a description of the page the link points to.

Answer engine optimization (AEO) is making content easy for AI assistants to find, understand and cite when they answer a question.

A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Search engines treat backlinks from relevant, trusted sites as a sign your site is worth ranking.

A canonical URL is the one address a page tells search engines to index when the same content can be reached at several URLs.

A dofollow link is an ordinary link without a nofollow, sponsored or ugc rel value, so search engines may count it as a vote for the page it points to.

Domain rating (DR) is Ahrefs' 0–100 score of how strong a site's backlink profile is. A higher DR site's links tend to carry more weight.

An early adopter is someone who tries new products before most people do, accepts rough edges, and often gives the feedback that shapes a product.

A featured placement is a paid spot that pins a product to a fixed position on a board or page for a set time, always labelled as paid.

Freemium is a pricing model with a free plan that's useful on its own and paid plans for more — more usage, more features or a team.

IndexNow is an open protocol a site uses to tell search engines a page was added or changed, so they recrawl it sooner.

A launch badge is a small image on a maker's site linking to their listing — social proof for visitors and, on some platforms, a way to earn a followed link.

A launch platform is a site where makers present a new product on a set day or week, the community upvotes it, and the best launches win.

A launch week on MakerRadar is the ISO week a product is on the live board, from Monday 00:00 UTC to the next Monday, ranked by upvotes.

A leaderboard ranks products by votes over a period — a launch week, a month, a year or all time — so the most-backed ones are easy to find.

llms.txt is a Markdown file at a site's root that tells AI models what the site is and links its key pages, in a form they read easily.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard for connecting AI assistants to tools and data, so an agent can call a service directly.

A meta description is a one- or two-sentence summary of a page in its HTML. Search engines often show it under the title in results.

A nofollow link carries rel="nofollow", asking search engines not to pass ranking credit to the page it links to. It can still send real visitors.

Open-source software publishes its source code under a licence that lets anyone use, study, change and share it.

A Premium launch is a paid MakerRadar launch in the week you choose, pinned on the home board, with a dofollow link to your site. It never changes your rank.

A product launch is the planned moment a new product is introduced to the public — on launch platforms, social media, a newsletter and its own site at once.

Programmatic SEO is publishing many pages from structured data — one per category, location or comparison — each answering a specific search.

Rich results are search listings with extras beyond the title and description — ratings, prices, FAQs, breadcrumbs — drawn from a page's structured data.

robots.txt is a file at a site's root telling crawlers which paths they may fetch. It controls crawling, not indexing.

A sitemap is a file listing a site's pages, usually /sitemap.xml, so search engines can find and recrawl every page worth indexing.

Social proof is evidence that other people use and like a product — reviews, upvotes, user counts, logos, awards — that makes newcomers more willing to try it.

A sponsored link is a paid or affiliate link marked rel="sponsored", the way Google asks sites to label links that were bought.

A startup directory is a website that lists new products, apps and tools so people can find them — and gives each listing a page and, often, a backlink.

Structured data is machine-readable information about a page — what it is, who made it, its rating — usually written as JSON-LD with schema.org types.

Thin content is a page with too little original substance to be useful — a near-empty list, a stub, a duplicate — which search engines rank poorly.

The title tag is a page's <title> — the clickable headline in search results. Google shows about 50–60 characters of it.

A UGC link is a link in user-generated content — a comment, a forum post, a profile — marked rel="ugc" so search engines know the site didn't choose it.

An upvote is one member's vote for a product. On a launch board, products are ranked by how many upvotes they get.