Taxonomy
A taxonomy is a list of terms arranged from general to specific, where each term is linked to a broader parent, narrower children, or both. That's how the NISO standard for agreed word lists defines it. On a website, the same idea sorts your pages, like Services, then Plumbing, then Drain cleaning on a plumber's site.
Source: NISO, ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2005 (R2010), Guidelines for Controlled Vocabularies, glossary and section 5.4.3, checked October 29, 2026
What Taxonomy means for your business
Search results for the word lean to biology, but that meaning won't help you here. For a business, it's the way your site sorts its pages: services under a main services page, products under categories, posts under topics. A clear taxonomy helps a buyer get to the page they want in a click or two.
You also sit inside other people's taxonomies. Google Business Profile has its own category list, Google Merchant Center sorts products into Google's product taxonomy, and Schema.org arranges its types the same way. Picking the closest match in each tells those systems what you sell in their own words.
We'd keep a site's categories few, name them the way buyers talk, and prune any tag page that holds only one post.
If AI answers put you in the wrong category, like calling a commercial cleaner a maid service, fixing how you're described across the web is where we'd begin.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, both answers led with biology. Google's AI Overview cited Wikipedia, a college page, the Convention on Biological Diversity and YouTube, then gave the website meaning, citing Nielsen Norman Group and Salesforce. ChatGPT cited nothing and also covered Bloom's taxonomy in education.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
Related terms in entities and the knowledge graph
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