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The GEO & AEO glossary
Generative Engine Optimization is a new discipline with its own vocabulary. Here's every term explained clearly, cross-linked, and grounded in how AI answer engines actually work.
AI Crawlers
AI crawlers are the bots — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and others — that fetch web content either to train an AI model or to power live, retrieval-based answers; identifying and welcoming the ones that matter to you is a prerequisite for GEO.
Read definition →AI Overviews
AI Overviews are Google's AI-generated answer summaries that appear above the classic organic results for many searches, synthesizing multiple sources into one response with inline citations.
Read definition →AI Search
AI search describes search experiences powered by generative AI that return a synthesized, conversational answer with citations — ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Google AI Mode — rather than a ranked list of links to click through.
Read definition →Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
AEO is optimizing content to be selected as the direct answer by any answer-first surface — voice assistants, featured snippets, and AI chat assistants — and is largely used interchangeably with GEO today.
Read definition →Citations in AI
A citation in AI is when an answer engine explicitly names or links to your site as the source of a fact or claim in its response — functionally the AI-era equivalent of a backlink, and the clearest, most attributable form of GEO success.
Read definition →Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
GEO is the practice of shaping content, structured data and off-site presence so generative AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews surface, cite and recommend your brand in their answers.
Read definition →GEO vs SEO
GEO and SEO share the same technical foundation — crawlability, authority, clear content — but SEO optimizes for ranking in a list of links a human scans, while GEO optimizes for being cited or recommended inside a synthesized AI answer a human reads once.
Read definition →llms.txt
llms.txt is a proposed plaintext file at a site's root that gives AI models and agents a clean, curated summary of the site — what it is, who it's for, and links to its most important pages — in a format built for machine reading rather than human browsing.
Read definition →Prompt Tracking
Prompt tracking is the practice of maintaining a fixed set of representative buyer questions and periodically re-running them against multiple AI answer engines to monitor whether, how, and how favorably your brand appears over time.
Read definition →Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
RAG is the technique where a language model retrieves relevant documents or passages at query time and grounds its answer in them, instead of relying only on facts it memorized during training — it's why being retrievable is a prerequisite for being cited.
Read definition →Share of Voice in AI
Share of voice in AI is the percentage of AI-generated answers, across a fixed set of tracked prompts, in which your brand is mentioned or recommended — the core visibility metric for GEO, tracked engine by engine and against named competitors.
Read definition →Structured Data for AI
Structured data for AI is schema.org markup, JSON-LD and clean semantic HTML that makes facts on a page unambiguous and machine-parseable, so both search crawlers and LLM retrieval systems can extract and cite them accurately.
Read definition →See where your brand stands today
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