As businesses increasingly face pressures to change their business practices to address global sustainability challenges, Sustainable Business Models (SBMs) have emerged as potential solutions. However, while they have gained significant scholarly attention, the SBM research stream is increasingly experiencing overlaps, inconsistent use, and accumulation of loosely defined Sustainability-Oriented Business Model (SOBM) concepts. This threatens the coherence of the SBM field by limiting cumulative theoretical development and practical implementation. To address these issues, this paper conducts a systematic literature review of the SBM field with the aim of clarifying, defining, and structuring key SOBM concepts. A structured synthesis approach that distinguishes between each SOBM concept’s goals, mechanisms, and enablers was applied to develop empirically grounded concept definitions along with a business ontology mapping their overlaps and relationships. The findings and outcomes of this paper offer critical conceptual delineations and distinctions for previously ambiguous key SOBM concepts. Namely, the unique aspects, boundaries and interrelationships between said concepts are clarified, thereby guiding the SBM field’s development and practical applications.