GEO & AI Search Glossary
Short answer: Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of making an AI assistant name your business when it answers a question. The terms below are the vocabulary that goes with it — each defined in one paragraph here, with a full page of detail behind every entry.
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
- The practice of shaping a brand's content and its footprint across the web so that generative AI assistants name and recommend that brand when they write an answer. Unlike SEO, the goal is not a ranked link — it is being the business the model mentions. Read more →
- Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
- Optimizing a page to be the single extracted answer a search engine shows or reads aloud — featured snippets, People Also Ask entries, voice assistant replies. AEO is about owning the snippet; GEO is about being named inside a generated answer. Read more →
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- The long-standing practice of improving a site so it ranks higher in a list of search results. It remains the technical floor GEO is built on: a page a model cannot crawl or read cannot be cited. Read more →
- Generative engine
- An AI system that answers a question by writing new text rather than returning a list of links — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek and Meta AI are the six we optimize for. Read more →
- LLM citation
- A mention of a source, brand or URL inside an AI-generated answer. Citations are the visibility currency of generative search: if the model does not cite you, the user never learns you exist. Read more →
- AI Overview
- Google's AI-written summary that appears above the traditional results. It draws on a mix of web pages and community sources, and it is one of the surfaces GEO work targets. Read more →
- Information gain
- How much genuinely new information a page adds compared with everything already published on the topic. Content that only restates what ten other pages say gives a model no reason to cite it; proprietary data and a unique angle do. Read more →
- Direct-answer block
- A short, self-contained passage — typically 40 to 60 words — placed near the top of a page that answers the page's core question outright. It is the passage a generative engine is most likely to lift verbatim. Read more →
- Cite-backed evidence
- Hard statistics and named authorities included in the body of a page with their sources attached. In the KDD 2024 GEO study, adding statistics, citations and quotations raised a page's visibility in generated answers by up to 40%. Read more →
- Quotable expert
- A named, attributable person from your business who says something specific and repeatable in your content. Models anchor trust to real entities, and a named expert gives them a person to attribute a claim to. Read more →
- Off-model brand sentiment
- What the rest of the web — forums, communities, review threads — says about a brand. Generative engines read these sources when deciding whether a brand is credible, which is why GEO work extends beyond your own domain. Read more →
- Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
- The technique behind most AI search: before answering, the system retrieves relevant documents and writes its answer from them. GEO exists because the retrieval step decides which brands even get a chance to be mentioned. Read more →
- Grounding
- Tying a model's answer to real, retrievable sources rather than to its training memory. Grounded answers are the ones that carry citations — and therefore the ones GEO can influence. Read more →
- Hallucination
- When a model states something confidently that is not true. Publishing clear, sourced, unambiguous facts about your own business reduces the chance an engine invents details about you. Read more →
- llms.txt
- A plain-text file at the root of a site that summarizes what the site is and points AI systems to its most important pages. This site publishes one at /llms.txt and a longer version at /llms-full.txt. Read more →
- AI crawler
- A bot operated by an AI company that fetches web pages for training or for live retrieval — GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot and others. Blocking them in robots.txt removes you from the answers they generate. Read more →
- Structured data (schema markup)
- Machine-readable JSON-LD embedded in a page that states what the page is about, who published it and how its entities relate. It does not force a citation, but it removes ambiguity about who you are. Read more →
- Entity
- A specific, identifiable thing — a company, a person, a product — that a model can distinguish from similarly named things. Consistent naming, a single canonical home page and connected structured data are what make a brand a clean entity. Read more →
- Swipe file
- A ready-to-post draft written in the native voice of a specific community, used to seed an on-topic discussion that references your content. Used properly it starts a real conversation; used as spam it gets removed. Read more →