GEO Glossary

Short definitions of the terms that come up in AI search. Each one is written to be read on its own, and related terms are linked.

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)

AEO is the practice of structuring content so it can be turned directly into an answer: question-shaped headings, short and precise definitions, lists and table...

AI Citation

An AI citation is a generative engine naming a specific page as the source of an answer. It differs from a brand mention: a citation carries a link the user can...

AI Crawlers

AI crawlers are automated clients that collect content for language models. The main ones are GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Goo...

AI Share of Voice

AI share of voice is your portion of all brand mentions across the answers to a tracked prompt set. It is read comparatively — a percentage means nothing withou...

Brand Mention

A brand mention is your brand name appearing in an AI answer, with or without a source link. It shows the model recognises the brand and considers it relevant i...

Entity

An entity is a person, organisation, product or concept that a search engine or language model recognises and holds consistent facts about. If a brand cannot be...

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)

GEO is the practice of making a brand appear and be cited inside answers produced by generative search engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. Where cla...

Google AI Overview

AI Overview is the summarised answer Google shows above search results, assembled from several sources. Source selection overlaps with classic rankings but decr...

Grounding

Grounding is a language model basing its answer on sources retrieved by live web search. Without grounding, the answer comes from training memory and is closed...

IndexNow

IndexNow is a free protocol for notifying search engines the moment a URL is published or updated. Bing, Yandex, Naver and Seznam support it; Google does not.

Knowledge Graph

A knowledge graph stores entities and the relationships between them. Google's knowledge panel is its visible surface; a brand resolved in the graph is more lik...

LLM (Large Language Model)

An LLM is a model trained on very large text corpora that generates text conditioned on context. It is the technology behind ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplex...

Prompt (and Prompt Tracking)

A prompt is the question a user types into a language model. Prompt tracking means running the questions that matter to a brand against engines on a schedule an...

Zero-Click Search

A zero-click search is one where the user gets the answer on the results page or inside an AI response and leaves without visiting any site. It rose markedly fo...

llms.txt

llms.txt is a Markdown file at the site root that tells AI clients what the site is and where its important pages are. It is not a ranking signal; it is a conve...

robots.txt and AI Bots

robots.txt controls which crawlers may access which parts of a site. For AI visibility the critical detail is that training bots and search bots are separate: b...