GLOSSARY
AI search, defined.
Short, plain-English definitions of the terms you will hear when someone pitches you GEO, AEO, or AI search optimization.
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
- Structuring specific passages of content so search engines, voice assistants, and AI products can extract them as the direct answer to a question. AEO service →
- AI Mode
- Google's conversational search experience, which can break a complex question into several sub-searches and combine the results into one answer. Google AI Overviews & AI Mode optimization →
- AI Overview
- A generated summary shown at the top of some Google results, with links to the sources it drew on. Google AI Overviews optimization →
- AI referral traffic
- Website visits that arrive from an AI product, such as chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai. It can be segmented in analytics by referrer, though some AI-driven discovery shows up as direct or branded traffic instead.
- AI visibility
- How often, and how accurately, AI products mention or cite your brand in answers to relevant questions. AI visibility audit →
- Answer-first content
- Writing that states the answer in the first sentence or two under a heading, then supports it with detail. It is easier for readers to scan and for machines to extract.
- ChatGPT-User
- The user agent OpenAI uses when ChatGPT fetches a specific page on behalf of a user's request.
- Citation (AI)
- A link or source reference an AI product shows alongside a generated answer. Being cited is distinct from being mentioned by name.
- ClaudeBot
- Anthropic's web crawler. Whether to allow it is a decision separate from appearing in search-style answers.
- E-E-A-T
- Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness: the qualities Google's quality guidelines ask human raters to look for. It is a framework for assessing quality, not a single ranking factor.
- Entity
- A distinct, identifiable thing a search system can recognize, such as a business, person, or place, along with its attributes and relationships.
- Entity consistency
- Describing your business the same way everywhere: the same name, address, phone number, description, and profile links across your site and third-party listings.
- Featured snippet
- A highlighted answer extracted from a web page and shown above the regular results.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
- Improving the likelihood that generative AI products mention and cite your brand in their answers, through crawler access, citable content, entity clarity, and independent mentions. GEO service →
- Google-Extended
- A robots.txt token that controls whether Google may use your content for certain generative AI purposes. It does not affect whether you appear in Google Search.
- GPTBot
- OpenAI's crawler used to collect data that may be used for model training.
- Grounding
- Anchoring an AI model's answer in retrieved sources, such as live web pages, rather than relying only on what it learned during training.
- Knowledge graph
- A structured database of entities and the relationships between them, used by search engines to understand who and what things are.
- LLM (large language model)
- The type of AI model behind products such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity. LLM visibility →
- llms.txt
- A proposed plain-text file that lists a site's key pages for AI systems. Adoption is limited, and Google has said site owners can ignore it for its AI features.
- OAI-SearchBot
- OpenAI's crawler for ChatGPT's search results. Allowing it is what matters for appearing in ChatGPT search. ChatGPT SEO →
- People Also Ask (PAA)
- A Google result feature showing related questions with expandable answers.
- PerplexityBot
- Perplexity's crawler for its search index. Perplexity SEO →
- Prompt tracking
- Running a fixed set of realistic questions on AI products on a schedule and recording whether and how a brand appears, to measure change over time.
- Query fan-out
- When an AI search product splits one question into several related sub-queries, retrieves results for each, and combines them. Covering the sub-questions improves your odds of being a source.
- RAG (retrieval-augmented generation)
- A technique where an AI model retrieves relevant documents first and then writes an answer based on them.
- Schema markup
- Structured data, usually JSON-LD, that labels the content of a page so machines can interpret it. It should match what is visible on the page.
- Third-party citation
- A mention or review of your business on a site you do not control. In AI answers these tend to carry more weight than self-published claims.
- Zero-click search
- A search that ends without the user clicking through to any website, because the answer was shown directly in the results.
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