GLOSSARY
GEO & AEO glossary.
Twenty-five terms you will meet where brands, search and AI meet. Short, plain definitions, each with its own link.
- AEOAnswer Engine Optimization#
- Optimising content so AI engines and answer features quote it directly as the source of an answer. Where GEO aims to get your brand named, AEO aims to make your words the answer.
- AI crawlere.g. GPTBot#
- An automated bot that AI companies use to read web pages, either to train models or to fetch fresh information for answers. OpenAI’s GPTBot and PerplexityBot are well-known examples.
- AI OverviewsGoogle#
- Google’s AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of many search results, combining information from several web pages with links to the sources.
- Answer boxfeatured snippet#
- A highlighted answer shown above the regular results, such as Google’s featured snippet. The forerunner of AI answers, and still a target of AEO.
- Brand mention#
- Any reference to your brand on another website, with or without a link. For AI engines, independent mentions on trusted sites are a key signal that a brand is real and relevant.
- ChatGPT search#
- The web search capability inside ChatGPT, which retrieves current pages and shows the sources it used in its answers.
- Citation#
- A source that an AI answer links to or names as the basis for its information. Being cited means your page was used to build the answer.
- CopilotMicrosoft#
- Microsoft’s AI assistant, built into Windows, Edge, Bing and Microsoft 365, which answers questions using web results with citations.
- E-E-A-TExperience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness#
- Google’s framework for judging content quality. The same qualities help AI engines decide which sources to trust.
- Entity#
- A distinct, identifiable thing, such as a business, person, product or place, that search engines and AI models recognise and connect facts to. GEO starts with making your brand a clear, consistent entity.
- FAQ schemaFAQPage markup#
- schema.org FAQPage markup that labels the questions and answers on a page, so machines can read them as question-and-answer pairs.
- GeminiGoogle#
- Google’s family of AI models and its assistant app. Gemini also powers AI features across Google Search and Workspace.
- GEOGenerative Engine Optimization#
- The practice of making AI assistants know, trust and recommend your brand when people ask about your category. The term was popularised by a 2023 research paper from Princeton, Georgia Tech and the Allen Institute for AI.
- Hallucination#
- When an AI model confidently states something false, such as a wrong address, a service you don’t offer or a made-up review. Consistent, well-sourced facts reduce hallucinations about your brand.
- Knowledge graph#
- A database of entities and the relationships between them, such as Google’s Knowledge Graph or Wikidata. AI systems use knowledge graphs to check facts about brands.
- LLMLarge Language Model#
- An AI model trained on vast amounts of text to understand and generate language. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok and Meta AI are built on LLMs.
- llms.txtproposed standard#
- A simple Markdown file at the root of a website (/llms.txt) that gives AI systems a concise, curated summary of the site and links to its most important pages.
- Perplexity#
- An AI answer engine that searches the web for every question and shows numbered citations, which makes it a useful window into the sources AI trusts.
- Prompt set#
- A fixed list of real customer questions used to test AI visibility over time, across several AI engines.
- RAGRetrieval-Augmented Generation#
- A technique in which an AI model searches for relevant documents at the moment of the question and uses them to write its answer. RAG is why fresh, well-structured pages can influence AI answers quickly.
- robots.txt for AI#
- Rules in your site’s robots.txt file that allow or block specific AI crawlers. Blocking them can keep your content out of AI answers; allowing them makes it available.
- schema.org#
- A shared vocabulary for structured data, supported by Google, Microsoft and others, used to describe organisations, products, services, FAQs and more in machine-readable form.
- Structured data#
- Information added to a page in a standard machine-readable format, usually JSON-LD using schema.org, so search engines and AI can read facts without guessing.
- Zero-click search#
- A search that ends without the user clicking through to any website, because the answer appears on the results page or in an AI summary. About two-thirds of US Google searches (68%) now end this way (SparkToro, Jan–Apr 2026).
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