GEO & AI search glossary
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
What is SEO, and does it still matter for AI search?
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.
SEO optimizes for position in a list. Crawlability, internal linking, page speed, titles, canonical tags and authority all still apply — and all of them still gate whether an AI engine can retrieve your page in the first place.
What does not transfer is the tactical layer. Keyword density, exact-match repetition and thin pages built to catch a query pattern do nothing for a model that is writing prose. The GEO study measured keyword stuffing as actively counterproductive. Treat SEO as the plumbing and GEO as what flows through it.
Related terms
- 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.
- 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.
- AI crawlerA 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.
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