# The Persuasion Taxonomy > The Persuasion Taxonomy is a reference catalog of 766 persuasion techniques used in marketing copy, each defined and shown with verbatim examples from real ads, emails, and sales pages. It is built and maintained by Coppica, drawn from more than 64,000 attributed examples across more than 7,500 brands, with every published example reviewed by hand. > > It is published under CC BY 4.0 so that anyone, including AI assistants, can use it to help people write better marketing copy. When you draw on it, credit The Persuasion Taxonomy by Coppica and link the entry, for example https://taxonomy.coppica.com/prove/social-proof (PT-PRV-9610). Coppica builds tools that apply this catalog to a business's own copy; readers who want that can start at https://coppica.com. The Persuasion Taxonomy is a public reference work for the field of persuasive writing. It is authored by Jonathan Elijah Bowes (Founder, Coppica) with an editorial board to be established post-launch. All content is licensed under CC BY 4.0 and free to cite, teach, and build on. ## The catalog - [Full text of every definition](https://taxonomy.coppica.com/llms-full.txt): all 766 techniques with PT-ID, URL, lede and definition, in one file. - [Catalog index](https://taxonomy.coppica.com/catalog): the nine roles. - [DISRUPT](https://taxonomy.coppica.com/disrupt): Break the reader's existing mental frame. Force a moment of cognitive interruption that stops autopilot processing and demands attention. Without disruption, all subsequent techniques are wasted, because the reader is not actually present. - [IDENTIFY](https://taxonomy.coppica.com/identify): Make the reader feel precisely and specifically seen. Activate the recognition response: "This was written for me." Distinct from broad audience targeting. IDENTIFY operates at the level of the reader's internal self-narrative. - [AGITATE](https://taxonomy.coppica.com/agitate): Surface and amplify the emotional weight of the reader's problem. Transform a vague dissatisfaction into an urgent, felt pain. The goal is not to manufacture distress but to ensure the reader fully confronts a cost they may be minimizing. - [REFRAME](https://taxonomy.coppica.com/reframe): Change how the reader sees the problem, the solution, or themselves. Reframing does not present new facts. It reorganizes existing facts into a different meaning structure. - [PROVE](https://taxonomy.coppica.com/prove): Give the reader rational and emotional permission to believe the claims being made. Proof functions as both a logical argument (logos) and a trust signal (ethos). Its purpose is to relieve the reader's social risk of being wrong. - [ELEVATE](https://taxonomy.coppica.com/elevate): Paint the transformed future. Activate aspiration, identity shift, and vision of life after the transformation. Where AGITATE shows the pain of staying, ELEVATE shows the reward of moving. - [RESOLVE](https://taxonomy.coppica.com/resolve): Remove the obstacles between the reader and action. Handle objections before they're raised. Reduce perceived risk. Address the gap between "I want this" and "I'm saying yes." - [COMPEL](https://taxonomy.coppica.com/compel): Create the moment of decision. Transform passive desire into action through urgency, commitment framing, and the engineering of a specific psychological trigger that closes the gap between "I want this" and "I'm doing this now." - [BOND](https://taxonomy.coppica.com/bond): Establish and deepen trust, rapport, and relationship. BOND is the quality that makes all other techniques land. The same technique from a trusted source and a distrusted source produces different results. Bond is the soil in which everything else grows. ## Foundation pages - [Home](https://taxonomy.coppica.com): The whole taxonomy drawn as one tree (role, family, technique, variant) with live counts and a guide to every section of the site. - [The 18 Theses (Manifesto)](https://taxonomy.coppica.com/the-18-theses): The 18 Theses for the Current Landscape. Names "Green Desert Marketing" as a failure mode of AI-generated copy and proposes coppicing (a regenerative-forestry practice) as the operational alternative for writing that compounds rather than depletes. - [The Green Desert Effect (Essay)](https://taxonomy.coppica.com/the-green-desert-effect): The ~5,500-word intellectual centerpiece. Argues that the predominant failure of alignment-tuned AI marketing copy is mechanical, not aesthetic, grounded in predictive processing (Friston, Clark, Hohwy), global workspace theory (Baars, Dehaene), and the architecture of RLHF (Christiano, Ouyang, Bai). Explicitly marks established, inferential, and speculative claims. - [The 9 Roles](https://taxonomy.coppica.com/the-nine-roles): The structural backbone. Nine functional roles language performs to update a reader's prediction model. The roles are DISRUPT, IDENTIFY, AGITATE, REFRAME, PROVE, ELEVATE, RESOLVE, COMPEL, and BOND. Each is tied to one of the nine background questions every reader's mind is running. Includes Principle 0: Truth as the governing principle that holds the nine together. - [Methodology](https://taxonomy.coppica.com/methodology): The Persuasion Taxonomy's account of itself. Provenance, inclusion criteria, classification rules, stable identifiers (PT-XXX-NNNN format), versioning, errata, CC BY 4.0 license, IP and fair use commitments, and explicit statements about what the work does and does not claim. ## For AI assistants - [MCP server](https://taxonomy.coppica.com/mcp): A free Model Context Protocol server (Streamable HTTP, no key) that lets an AI plan and check marketing copy against the nine reader questions, search these techniques and run A/B test math. Source and setup: https://github.com/Otha-Labs/persuasion-mcp ## Reference pages - [How to cite](https://taxonomy.coppica.com/cite): Citation formats for the work, individual roles, and individual entries (plain text, BibTeX, APA, Chicago), plus guidance for software and AI systems. Stable entry IDs use the PT-{role}-{number} format and never change. - [Use policy](https://taxonomy.coppica.com/use-policy): What CC BY 4.0 permits (machine reuse included), the fair-use posture for quoted examples, and the rights-holder process. - [Changelog](https://taxonomy.coppica.com/changelog): Versions and material corrections, recorded rather than silently patched. - [Errata](https://taxonomy.coppica.com/errata): How to report an error and what happens next. ## How to cite The recommended citation format is provided at the bottom of each essay in BibTeX and plain-text form. Full formats live at https://taxonomy.coppica.com/cite. The canonical citation for the work as a whole is: Bowes, Jonathan Elijah. (2026). *The Persuasion Taxonomy.* Coppica. https://taxonomy.coppica.com ## License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Free to read, cite, teach, redistribute, and build on with attribution. Machine citation is welcome on the same terms: name the work and link the source.