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
Content & relevance · What makes a page the best answer to a question, and keeps it that way.
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- Content & relevanceContent decayThe gradual loss of rankings, traffic and AI citations a page suffers as its information ages, competitors publish better answers or intent shifts — a predictable decline fixed by refreshing, consolidating or retiring the page.
- Content & relevanceContent freshnessHow recently a page was substantively created or updated, which search engines weigh for time-sensitive queries and most AI answer engines appear to weigh even more — the pages they cite are measurably newer than classic search results.
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- Content & relevanceScaled content abuseGoogle’s spam-policy term for producing many pages mainly to manipulate search rankings rather than to help people — whether by AI, templates or hand — and it targets the purpose and value of the content, not the use of AI itself.
- Content & relevanceSearch intentThe goal behind a query — to learn something, reach a specific site, compare options or buy — and matching it decides which kind of page, from a guide to a product page to a comparison, search engines and AI answers treat as relevant.
T
- Content & relevanceTitle tagThe HTML title element that names a page for browsers, search results and AI retrieval, and it is the main source Google draws on for a result’s title link — though Google may rewrite that link when the tag is missing, stuffed or mismatched to the page.
- Content & relevanceTopic clusterA group of interlinked pages on one subject — a broad pillar page linked to and from narrower pages on each subtopic — built to show search engines and AI retrieval systems complete coverage of the topic rather than a single article.
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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