Customer words vs. jargon: write the way people ask

AI models match a question against your content based on the words actually used, not your industry's internal terms. If you write "thermal surface treatment" where the customer googles "rust protection", you lose the citation even though the content technically answers the question. The fix is to write in the customer's words, not the industry's.

Jargon is invisible to you, but obvious to the customer

Most industries develop an internal language that becomes so natural you stop noticing it. The problem is that the customer, and the model trying to match the customer's question against your content, doesn't share that language. A model that has learned people ask "why is my roof leaking" won't find it as easily in text that only talks about "insufficient membrane overlap in the roofing layer".

Find the customer's actual words, don't guess them

Go through real inquiries: emails, chat logs, phone notes, questions from your sales team. Look at which words and phrasing customers actually use when describing their problem, not your solution. Customers typically describe the symptom ("the water won't drain") long before they know the technical term ("drain blockage"). Content that covers both, the symptom and the technical term, is easiest to match no matter how the question is phrased.

Use the technical term, but explain it in the customer's words

The solution isn't to remove industry terminology entirely. It signals expertise and is often what experts are actually searching for. The solution is to use both: mention the technical term, but explain it immediately with how a customer would describe the same thing. "Thermal surface treatment (rust protection that's fused on by heat) prevents corrosion for many years" covers both the customer googling the symptom and the professional who knows the term.

Test it directly

The most reliable way to find out whether your language lands is to ask an AI model the same questions your customers ask, and see what kind of answer comes back and which businesses show up. Do the words in the answer match how you describe the service yourselves, or does the model use completely different phrasing than you do?

Build a list of synonyms

Make a simple list, a spreadsheet works well, with the technical term in one column and all the ways customers describe the same problem in another. Use the list actively when writing new content, so that the most common customer phrasings show up somewhere on the page, even if the main text uses the technical language.

This applies to headings too, not just body text

It doesn't help much to write in a customer-friendly way in the body text if the heading or page title still uses an internal term no customer googles. Check that your most important headings actually contain words customers themselves would use, since the heading is often what a model weights most heavily when deciding what the page is about.

This ties closely into the rest of the GEO work. We list several more concrete measures in How your business becomes visible in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity.

Want to see whether the words on your website already match your customers' language? Run a free check and compare the answer with how you describe the service yourselves.