AI search and AEO glossary: 25 terms explained

By Get AI Vizible · Updated

Short answer

This glossary defines the terms used in AI search and answer engine optimization, from AEO, GEO and LLMO to AI visibility, share of voice, citation rate, AI Overviews, llms.txt and AI crawlers, in one or two plain sentences each.

Strategy terms

  • Answer engine: an AI system that answers questions directly in natural language, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, DeepSeek or Google AI Overviews.
  • Answer engine optimization (AEO): the practice of getting your brand named, recommended or cited in answers from answer engines. See what is AEO.
  • Generative engine optimization (GEO): another name for AEO, used mostly for answers written by large language models.
  • LLM optimization (LLMO): the same goal phrased around large language models.
  • AI search: searching by asking an AI assistant rather than scanning a list of links.
  • Zero-click answer: an answer the user reads without visiting any website.
  • Buyer question (prompt): a question a potential customer asks an AI assistant before choosing a product, used as the unit of AI visibility tracking.

Metrics

  • AI visibility: the percentage of AI answers that mention your brand.
  • Average position: where your brand appears among the brands named in an answer, averaged over answers that mention you.
  • Share of voice: your mentions as a share of mentions of you and your tracked competitors.
  • Citation rate: the percentage of answers that link to or name your website.
  • Sentiment: whether an answer describes your brand positively, neutrally or negatively.
  • FactCheck: checking the claims AI makes about your brand against your real facts.

Engines and features

  • Google AI Overviews: AI-written summaries at the top of some Google results, with links to sources.
  • Google AI Mode: Google's conversational search mode built on Gemini.
  • Perplexity: an answer engine that searches the web and cites sources on every answer.
  • Model memory: what a language model learned during training, used when it answers without searching.
  • Retrieval (RAG): fetching documents at question time and using them to write the answer.
  • Citation: a source link an engine shows with its answer.

Technical terms

  • AI crawler: a bot that reads web pages for AI training or AI search, such as GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot. See llms.txt and AI crawlers.
  • Google-Extended: a robots.txt token that controls whether Google may use your content for Gemini.
  • llms.txt: a Markdown file at the root of a site that summarises it for language models.
  • llms-full.txt: an optional companion file with the full text of key pages.
  • Schema markup: structured data (JSON-LD) that states facts about a page, product, organisation or FAQ in a machine-readable way.
  • Entity: a distinct thing, such as a brand, person or product, that engines recognise and connect facts to.

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