Glossary
The language of AI visibility
Clear definitions for the terms behind answer engine optimization — no jargon for its own sake.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
The practice of getting your brand recommended by AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
A near-synonym for AEO focused on optimizing for generative AI search experiences.
AI Visibility
How often and how prominently your brand appears in AI assistant answers for your category.
Share of Model
Your brand's share of recommendations across AI answers, relative to competitors.
Mention Rate
The percentage of relevant questions in which an AI engine mentions your brand.
AI Overview
Google's AI-generated answer that appears above traditional search results.
llms.txt
A proposed text file that gives AI crawlers a curated map of your most important pages.
Structured Data (Schema.org)
Machine-readable markup that tells AI exactly what your page and brand are about.
Citations
The sources an AI engine references when generating an answer.
Competitor Gap
Questions where AI recommends your competitors but not you.
Prompt Intent
The underlying goal behind the question a user asks an AI assistant.
Hallucination
When an AI states something false or invented with confidence.
Query Fan-Out
The technique Google's AI Mode uses to break one question into many sub-queries, then synthesize the results into a single answer.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
An AI technique that retrieves live external documents and feeds them to a language model so its answer is grounded in current, real sources.
Grounding (in AI)
Connecting an AI model's answer to verifiable external sources — like live search results — so it's factual rather than invented.
GPTBot
OpenAI's web crawler that gathers content to help train and inform ChatGPT and its search features.
Zero-Click Search
A search where the user gets their answer directly on the results page — from an AI Overview, snippet or knowledge panel — without clicking any link.
AI Crawler
A bot that fetches web content to feed AI systems — for training, live retrieval, or both — such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot.
Semantic Search
Search that matches meaning and intent rather than exact keywords, using language models to understand what a query really means.
Knowledge Graph
A structured network of entities (people, brands, places) and their relationships that search and AI systems use to understand the world.
Entity SEO
Optimizing so search and AI systems recognize your brand as a clear, well-defined entity — not just a string of keywords.
E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust)
Google's framework for judging content quality by first-hand experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness.
Google AI Mode
Google's full conversational search experience — a chat-style interface distinct from the AI Overview box on a normal results page.
Large Language Model (LLM)
The AI system, trained on vast text, that powers ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini — generating answers rather than returning link lists.
Share of Voice (in AI Search)
Your brand's slice of all brand mentions across AI answers for your category — the AI-era version of a classic marketing metric.
Crawl Budget
The amount of attention a crawler — search or AI — spends fetching your pages before it moves on.
Prompt Engineering
Crafting the instructions given to an AI model to get more accurate, useful output — the user-side skill of the LLM era.
AI Agent
An AI system that doesn't just answer — it takes multi-step actions like browsing, comparing and booking on a user's behalf.
Agentic Search
Search performed by an AI agent that plans, runs multiple queries, reads results and synthesizes — instead of a human scanning links.
Vector Search
Search that matches by meaning using numeric embeddings of text, letting systems find relevant content with zero keyword overlap.