Plain-English guide

What our terms mean for your business

You shouldn't need a computer science degree to run a business online. Here is what the technical words on our site mean, and why each one matters to you.

AEO (answer engine optimization)

Making sure that when someone asks an AI assistant or a search engine's AI answer who to call, your business is one of the few it names.

Why it matters: more customers now act on the answer an assistant gives them without comparing a list of links. If you're not in the answer, you may never get the chance. Read our AEO FAQ.

Google Business Profile

The box that appears on Google Search and Google Maps when someone looks up your business: your hours, phone number, photos, directions and reviews.

Why it matters: for many local customers it is the first thing they see, before your website. Wrong hours, old photos or unanswered reviews cost you calls and visits. Keeping it accurate and active is one of the cheapest ways to win local customers.

SSL certificate

The thing that puts the padlock in the browser's address bar and makes your site load as https://. It scrambles what visitors send to your site, such as contact forms and orders, so nobody in between can read it.

Why it matters: when a certificate is missing or expired, browsers show visitors a full-page "Not secure" warning, and most people leave. Certificates expire on a schedule, so someone has to keep renewing them. We do.

SPF, DKIM and DMARC (and spoofing)

Three settings on your domain that prove an email really came from you. SPF lists who is allowed to send mail for your domain, DKIM adds a tamper-proof signature to each message, and DMARC tells other mail systems what to do with a message that fails those checks.

Spoofing is when a scammer sends email that looks like it came from your address, for example a fake invoice to your customers.

Why it matters: without these settings, your real invoices and quotes are more likely to land in spam, and scammers can impersonate you. Gmail and Yahoo now require them for anyone sending email in volume. Setting them up is a one-time job that quietly protects every email you send.

Phishing

Emails or messages that trick someone into clicking a bad link, opening a bad attachment or typing a password into a fake sign-in page.

Why it matters: it is the most common way small businesses get hacked. One click can hand over an email account, and from there your customers and bank details. Good filtering catches most of it before your team ever sees it.

Workspace tenant

Your company's own private space inside Google Workspace: your users, your email domain, your shared drives and your settings, separate from every other company's.

Why it matters: setting it up correctly from the start, with the right domain, users, groups and security settings, avoids lost email and messy permissions later.

Super admin

The Google Workspace account with full control: it can create and delete users, read settings and change security.

Why it matters: if that account is lost or misused, so is your company's control of its own email and files. We work with the narrowest admin role a task needs, never your super admin password.

Helpdesk

A place to send IT questions and problems, and a team that answers them, with every request tracked until it is solved.

Why it matters: instead of one employee becoming the accidental "IT person", you email us and get an answer, and nothing falls through the cracks.

LLMs and custom-trained intelligence

An LLM (large language model) is the kind of AI that reads and writes text, the technology behind tools like chatbots. A general chatbot knows a little about everything, so it often guesses at specifics such as where a setting lives in Google Workspace.

Why it matters: our intelligence is custom-trained by ex-Google engineers for Google Workspace and Google Cloud. It reads each request, finds the matching resolution and prepares the answer, and an engineer reviews every answer before it reaches you. You get faster, more consistent help without paying for a bigger team.

Open-weight models

An AI model whose "weights", the learned knowledge that makes it work, are published, so anyone can download it and run it on their own computers. Closed models only work as a service on the AI company's computers, which means your data has to be sent to them.

Why it matters: because our intelligence starts from open-weight models, we can run it on our own hardware and train it for Google Workspace, so your business data never has to leave for an AI company. It also means your support doesn't depend on another company's price changes or policy changes.

"Never reaches a third-party AI"

A third-party AI is an AI service run by another company, where whatever you type is sent to their computers.

Why it matters: your emails, files and customer details stay with us. Nothing you send is used to train anyone else's model. That makes it easier to answer your own customers when they ask how their information is handled.

Encrypted end to end

Data is scrambled so only the two ends of the connection can read it, here your browser and our servers. Anyone in between sees gibberish.

Why it matters: your support requests and attachments can't be read on the way to us, not even by the network companies that carry them.

Subprocessors

Other companies that handle some of your data on our behalf, for example the email service that delivers our replies.

Why it matters: you should know exactly who touches your data. We list every one on our security page, and the list is deliberately short.

Still have a question?

Email sales@tsdlabs.io. If a term on our site is still unclear, that's on us, and we'll explain it.