Glossary

AI search and GEO terms, defined

34 terms you will meet when measuring and improving how AI answer engines talk about a brand. Each entry starts with a direct definition, then explains why it matters and how it is measured.

• AI crawler

  An AI crawler is a bot an AI company runs to fetch web pages, for training models, for indexing a search product, or to read a page a user asked about.

• AI instructions page

  An AI instructions page is a public page that states a company's key facts in plain language for AI assistants: what it is, what it costs, who it is for, and how to describe it.

• AI readiness (of a page)

  AI readiness is how well a page exposes the signals answer engines use to decide what to cite: structure, authority, direct content, crawl-time trust and expertise markers.

• AI share of voice

  AI share of voice is a brand's share of all brand mentions across the AI answers to a prompt set, compared with its named competitors.

• AI visibility

  AI visibility is how often, and how prominently, AI answer engines mention or cite a brand when users ask questions in its category.

• AI visibility tracking

  AI visibility tracking is running a fixed set of prompts on AI answer engines on a schedule and recording mentions, positions, sentiment and citations over time.

• Answer engine optimization (AEO)

  AEO is optimizing content so that answer engines, from featured snippets to ChatGPT, select it as the answer to a question and cite it.

• Answer-first content

  Answer-first content states the direct answer to a question in the first sentences of a page or section, before context and detail.

• Brand mention

  A brand mention is an occurrence of a brand's name in an AI answer, whether or not the answer links to the brand's site.

• Brand sentiment (in AI answers)

  Brand sentiment is whether an AI answer portrays a mentioned brand positively, neutrally or negatively, judged on the brand's portrayal rather than the answer's tone.

• Citation (in an AI answer)

  A citation is a source link an AI answer engine attaches to its answer, showing which page a statement was drawn from.

• Citation analysis

  Citation analysis is the study of which pages and domains AI answers cite for a set of prompts, used to find the sources that shape a category.

• Competitor tracking (AI search)

  Competitor tracking records how named competitors are mentioned and cited in the same AI answers as your brand, prompt by prompt.

• Content brief (AI search)

  A content brief for AI search is a plan for a page built from the answers currently winning a prompt: the questions to cover, the structure to use and the sources to reference.

• E-E-A-T

  E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, Google's framework for judging whether content deserves to be trusted.

• Entity

  An entity is a thing an engine can identify unambiguously, such as a company, product or person, as opposed to a string of words that might mean several things.

• FAQPage schema

  FAQPage schema is JSON-LD that lists the questions and answers visible on a page, so engines can read them as ready-made question-and-answer pairs.

• Generative engine optimization (GEO)

  GEO is the practice of increasing how often AI answer engines mention and cite a brand or page, by shaping content, structure and off-site presence.

• Google AI Mode

  AI Mode is Google's conversational search tab that answers the whole query with a generated response and follow-up questions, instead of a results list.

• Google AI Overviews

  AI Overviews are the AI-written summaries Google shows at the top of some search results, with links to the pages the summary drew on.

• GPTBot

  GPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler for collecting training data; it is distinct from OAI-SearchBot, which indexes pages for ChatGPT search.

• Grounding (retrieval-augmented generation)

  Grounding is when an AI engine retrieves current documents, usually with a web search, and writes its answer from them, citing them as sources.

• Hallucination (brand misinformation)

  A hallucination is a confident but false statement in an AI answer, such as a wrong price, a feature a product does not have, or a defunct company described as active.

• Knowledge graph

  A knowledge graph is a database of entities and the relationships between them that search and answer engines use to understand who and what a query refers to.

• llms.txt

  llms.txt is a plain-text markdown file at the root of a site that describes the site and lists its key pages for language models and agents.

• Position in answer

  Position in answer is where a brand appears within an AI answer that mentions it: first, among the first few, or later.

• Prompt volume

  Prompt volume is an estimate of how often a question is asked of AI assistants, the AI-search analogue of keyword search volume.

• Query fan-out

  Query fan-out is when an answer engine turns one user prompt into several search queries, retrieves results for each, and combines them into one answer.

• Rank tracking

  Rank tracking is checking a site's position in search engine results for chosen keywords, by country and device, on a schedule.

• robots.txt for AI crawlers

  AI crawler rules in robots.txt are the User-agent groups that allow or block the named bots AI vendors use for training, search indexing and user-triggered fetches.

• Structured data (JSON-LD)

  Structured data is machine-readable markup, usually JSON-LD using schema.org vocabulary, that states what a page is: an article, a product, an organization, a FAQ.

• Topic (prompt cluster)

  A topic is a group of related prompts and keywords, such as pricing questions or comparisons with one competitor, used to report visibility at a meaningful level.

• Tracked prompt

  A tracked prompt is a question a buyer might ask an AI engine, run on a schedule so that changes in the answer can be measured over time.

• Zero-click search

  A zero-click search is a query answered on the results page itself, by a snippet, a panel or an AI overview, so the user never visits a website.