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.

An AI Overview is the generated summary Google places above its search results, written by a model from several web pages at once and shown with links to the sources it drew on.

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 making your content the source an AI answer engine cites when it answers a question, rather than a link a user clicks.

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.

Entity SEO is the work of making a search engine or AI system correctly identify who or what you are, as a distinct real-world thing rather than a string of characters. Its job is disambiguation, not ranking.

A featured snippet is a highlighted excerpt Google lifts word for word from a single webpage and shows above the ranked results. Once the dominant answer format, it has been largely displaced by AI Overviews on informational queries.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of modifying content so that generative engines are more likely to surface and cite it in their answers. The term comes from a 2024 academic paper and has a measurable definition.

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.

Large Language Model Optimization (LLMO) is a practitioner term for making content that large language models can find, understand and cite accurately. It has no agreed definition that separates it from GEO or AEO, and in practice the three describe the same work.

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.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is the technique of fetching relevant documents at the moment a question is asked and having the model write its answer from those documents. It is how every major AI answer engine works, which is why AI visibility is mostly a retrieval problem.

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.