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Discoverability surfaces
Revenue minus all variable costs of serving a customer — COGS plus CAC plus variable support — divided by revenue. Contribution margin is the per-customer dollar amount left to cover fixed costs and profit. Direct-to-consumer and product-led growth companies obsess over contribution margin because their CAC is so volatile that gross margin alone overstates unit economics. SaaS uses it less often, preferring gross margin plus CAC payback.
Programmatic SEO, AEO, GEO, AIO, and the schemas behind them.
A content strategy that generates hundreds or thousands of search-optimized pages from structured data using templates.
The practice of structuring website content so that AI assistants and large language models (LLMs) can accurately cite it when answering user questions.
An open protocol that allows websites to notify search engines (Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver, and others) about new or updated content in real time.
Structuring content so that answer engines — Google's People-Also-Ask, Reddit pull-quotes, Quora top answers, ChatGPT search results, Perplexity citations — can extract a complete, self-contained answer in 40–80 words.
The subset of GEO/AEO targeted specifically at Google's AI Overviews (formerly SGE).
A Schema.
JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data — the W3C-standard syntax for embedding structured data in web pages.
A Schema.
This definition is published under CC BY 4.0. Cite as:
The Data Nerd. "Contribution Margin." VC Deal Flow Signal Glossary, https://signals.gitdealflow.com/define/contribution-margin.
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