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
Measurement · How to see whether search and AI engines rank, cite and send you traffic.
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- MeasurementAI referral trafficThe visits a website receives from links inside AI assistants and answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Copilot, identified in analytics by referrer domains like chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai.
- MeasurementAI share of voiceThe percentage of AI-generated answers, across a fixed set of relevant prompts, that mention or cite a brand compared with its competitors — the AI-search version of the classic measure of a brand’s share of the market conversation.
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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.
Put the glossary to work on your site
Enter your site to see how often ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google cite your brand, and exactly what to publish next.
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