GEO & AI search glossary
Plain-English definitions of the Generative Engine Optimization terms that decide whether AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini mention and cite your brand.
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is optimizing content to be the direct answer an AI or search engine returns to a question, rathe…
- AI hallucinationAn AI hallucination is when a model states something false or invented with confidence — including wrong facts about your brand or…
- AI visibilityAI visibility is how often and how prominently AI assistants mention, cite, or recommend your brand when users ask buying question…
- Answer engineAn answer engine responds to a query with a synthesized answer instead of a list of links — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google…
- Buying promptA buying prompt is a real purchase-intent question a customer asks an AI assistant — e.g. 'best CRM for small agencies' or 'cheape…
- Citation rateCitation rate is the share of AI answers that link to or name your website as a source. It's stricter than a mention: being cited …
- Entity clarityEntity clarity is how unambiguously an AI can identify what your brand is, what it does, and how it relates to other entities. Cle…
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of optimizing your content and brand so AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexi…
- Google AI OverviewsGoogle AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries shown above traditional results for many searches. They synthesize and cite a h…
- GroundingGrounding is when an AI model bases its answer on retrieved, real sources (web pages, documents) rather than only its training mem…
- llms.txtllms.txt is a plain-text file at your domain root that gives AI crawlers a curated map of your most important, citation-worthy pag…
- Mention rateMention rate is the percentage of AI answers to your tracked prompts that name your brand at all — whether or not they link to you…
- Query fan-outQuery fan-out is when an answer engine expands one user question into several sub-queries, retrieves sources for each, and synthes…
- RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is the technique answer engines use to fetch relevant documents at query time and feed them t…
- Share of voice (AI search)Share of voice in AI search is the percentage of buying-question answers that mention your brand versus competitors, per engine. I…
- Structured dataStructured data (schema.org markup) is machine-readable code that labels what a page is — an article, product, FAQ, organization. …