The AI search glossary
Every term you need for SEO, GEO and AI visibility — defined in one sentence, then explained for teams that have to act on it. Sourced, dated, and written to be quoted.
Start here
New to AI search? Read these six, in order.
- 01Search engine optimizationThe index every AI engine retrieves from
- 02Generative engine optimizationEarning a place inside the answer
- 03Retrieval-augmented generationHow engines fetch sources before writing
- 04Query fan-outWhy one question becomes many searches
- 05AI citationWhat winning looks like
- 06AI share of voiceHow to measure it against competitors
AI search & GEO · The disciplines and the surfaces: SEO, GEO, AEO, and where AI answers appear.
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- AI search & GEOAI citationA link or source reference that an AI answer engine attaches to its response to show where a claim came from, and it differs from a brand mention in that it points to a specific page that can be clicked and can send traffic.
- AI search & GEOAI ModeA conversational search experience inside Google Search that answers complex questions with a generated response built from many parallel sub-searches and supports follow-up questions, rather than summarizing above the classic results as AI Overviews do.
- AI search & GEOAI OverviewsAI-generated summaries shown at the top of some Google search results, written by a Gemini model from pages in Google’s search index and linked to their sources — so they are won through ordinary Google eligibility, not a separate submission or special markup.
- AI search & GEOAI search engineA search product that answers a query with a response written by a large language model, grounded in web pages it retrieves and usually citing them, instead of returning a ranked list of links for the user to open.
- AI search & GEOAI visibilityA measure of how often, how prominently and how favorably a brand appears in answers from AI systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews for the questions its buyers ask — the AI-search counterpart to search rankings.
- AEOAI search & GEOAnswer engine optimizationThe practice of structuring content as direct, extractable answers so that systems which return one answer — featured snippets, voice assistants and AI chatbots — use it as the answer itself rather than listing it as one link among ten.
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Start here
New to AI search? Read these six, in order.
- 01Search engine optimizationThe index every AI engine retrieves from
- 02Generative engine optimizationEarning a place inside the answer
- 03Retrieval-augmented generationHow engines fetch sources before writing
- 04Query fan-outWhy one question becomes many searches
- 05AI citationWhat winning looks like
- 06AI share of voiceHow to measure it against competitors
Browse by topic
Seven areas, from how answer engines work to how you measure them.
AI search & GEO
The disciplines and the surfaces: SEO, GEO, AEO, and where AI answers appear.
How LLMs answer
How language models retrieve, rank and ground the sources they cite.
AI crawlers
The bots that read your site, what each one does, and how to control them.
Technical SEO
Rendering, indexing and markup: whether engines can read the page at all.
Content & relevance
What makes a page the best answer to a question, and keeps it that way.
Authority & off-site
Links, mentions and entities: why engines trust one source over another.
Measurement
How to see whether search and AI engines rank, cite and send you traffic.
Questions about the vocabulary
What's the difference between SEO, GEO and AEO?
SEO earns rankings in search results, AEO formats content so it can be used as a direct answer, and GEO earns citations inside AI-generated answers. All three rest on the same foundation — crawlable, indexed, genuinely useful pages — so they’re layers of one job, not three competing strategies.
What does LLM SEO mean?
LLM SEO is making a brand visible in what large language models say — both from their training data and from the pages they cite when they search the web. It’s the model-centric name for the same work GEO describes.
Which AI crawlers should I allow?
Allow each engine’s search and user-triggered bots — OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User, PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User — and decide on training crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended separately. Blocking a training crawler doesn’t remove you from that engine’s search.
How is this glossary kept accurate?
Every entry is dated and cites its sources, and the original frameworks are labelled as ours. Entries on fast-moving topics — crawlers, engine behavior, analytics — are re-checked every quarter, and an entry’s updated date changes only when its facts are re-verified.
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