AEO, GEO & SEO glossary

An AI citation is a mention or source reference an AI answer engine includes when it uses your website's content to generate a response.

The AI Citation Score measures whether real AI engines, Perplexity, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude, actually cite a business today, based on live test queries rather than theoretical readiness.

An AI crawler is an automated bot, like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, or PerplexityBot, that AI companies use to fetch and index website content for their answer engines and model training.

AI search describes the growing set of tools, ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, that answer user questions directly instead of returning a ranked list of links.

An answer engine is a search tool, like Perplexity, ChatGPT Search, or Google AI Overviews, that responds to queries with a direct, synthesized answer instead of a ranked list of links.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews can extract it and cite your business directly.

A backlink is a link from another website to yours, one of the strongest traditional signals of authority and trust used by both search engine rankings and AI training and citation systems.

Core Web Vitals are Google's metrics for real-world page experience, loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability, that factor into both search rankings and how easily AI crawlers can render a page.

Crawlability is whether search engine and AI bots can successfully access, render, and read a website's pages, governed by robots.txt rules, server responses, and site structure.

Domain Authority is a third-party score that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search results, based largely on the quantity and quality of its backlink profile.

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, Google's framework for judging whether content and its author are credible enough to rank or be cited.

A featured snippet (or answer box) is a highlighted excerpt Google pulls from a webpage and displays at the top of search results to directly answer a query.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of building brand and topical authority across the web so large language models represent your business accurately when they generate answers.

A knowledge graph is a database of entities, people, places, businesses, and the relationships between them, that search engines and AI systems use to understand and verify facts about a topic.

llms.txt is a proposed standard text file, placed at a website's root, that gives AI crawlers and language models a curated, machine-readable summary of a site's key pages and content.

Local SEO is the practice of optimizing a business's online presence, listings, Google Business Profile, and citations, so it appears in geographically relevant search and map results.

NAP consistency is the practice of keeping a business's Name, Address, and Phone number identical across every website, directory, and citation, a key trust signal for local search and AI answer engines.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of improving a website's technical health, content, and authority signals so it ranks higher in traditional search engine results pages like Google.

A SERP (Search Engine Results Page) is the page a search engine shows after a query, now increasingly mixing traditional links with AI-generated overviews, featured snippets, and local packs.

Structured data (schema markup) is standardized code, typically Schema.org vocabulary in JSON-LD, added to a webpage so search engines and AI systems can understand its content unambiguously.

A zero-click search is a query where the user gets their answer directly on the results page, an AI overview, featured snippet, or knowledge panel, without clicking through to any website.