The AEO glossary
The words that come up when you start working on AI visibility, explained the way we would explain them on a call.
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
- AEO is the practice of making content easy for AI assistants and answer features to find, understand and quote. It covers crawler access, answer-first writing, structured data and entity clarity, with the goal of being named or cited when buyers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google a question.
- Related:GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)Answer-first contentCitation
- AI Mode
- AI Mode is Google's conversational search experience, where the results page is an AI-written answer and users ask follow-up questions. It uses Gemini models and Google's search index, and breaks one question into several related searches before writing a reply with linked sources.
- Related:AI OverviewsGroundingZero-click search
- AI Overviews
- AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries Google shows above the regular results for some searches, with links to the sources used. Pages must be indexed and eligible for snippets to be cited, and there is no separate technical requirement beyond normal Search eligibility.
- Related:AI ModeZero-click searchCitation
- Answer-first content
- Answer-first content states the direct answer in the opening one or two sentences of a page or section, then adds explanation and detail. It suits readers who skim and makes it easy for answer engines to lift a clean, self-contained passage as a quote.
- Related:AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)CitationSchema markup
- Brand mention
- A brand mention is any time an AI answer, article, review or discussion names your company, with or without a link. In AI search, unlinked mentions on trusted sites help engines confirm you are real and relevant, and being named inside an AI answer is a key visibility metric.
- Related:CitationShare of voice (AI)Entity
- Citation
- A citation is a linked source an AI engine shows alongside its answer to indicate where information came from. Being cited sends credibility and often traffic to your page. Citations typically go to passages that answer the question clearly and agree with other trusted sources.
- Related:Brand mentionGroundingAnswer-first content
- Crawl budget
- Crawl budget is the number of pages a crawler is willing and able to fetch from your site in a given period. Slow servers, endless URL variations and duplicate content waste it. For large sites, a tight budget can mean important pages are refreshed rarely by search and AI crawlers.
- Related:OAI-SearchBotllms.txt
- E-E-A-T
- E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, the qualities Google's quality guidelines use to describe reliable content. It is not one ranking factor but a summary of what Google tries to reward, and it weighs most heavily on health, finance and legal topics.
- Related:EntityAI Overviews
- Entity
- An entity is a distinct, identifiable thing such as a company, person, product or place that search engines and language models can recognize and describe. Brands with consistent facts across their site, schema and third-party profiles are easier for AI engines to identify and recommend with confidence.
- Related:Knowledge GraphsameAsWikidata
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
- GEO is the practice of increasing how often and how favorably a brand appears in answers written by generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. It overlaps heavily with AEO and leans more on reputation work: consistent entity data, reviews and third-party mentions.
- Related:AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)Brand mentionShare of voice (AI)
- Grounding
- Grounding is when an AI model bases its answer on retrieved, current sources rather than only on what it learned in training. Search-enabled assistants ground answers in web pages and cite them. Grounded answers are where most brand citations come from.
- Related:RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)CitationHallucination
- Hallucination
- A hallucination is a confident but false statement produced by an AI model, such as a wrong price, a fake feature or a nonexistent office. Clear, consistent and easily retrievable facts about your business reduce the chance that assistants invent details about you.
- Related:GroundingEntity
- JSON-LD
- JSON-LD is a format for adding structured data to a web page inside a script tag, using the schema.org vocabulary. It is Google's recommended way to describe organizations, articles, products, FAQs and more in machine-readable form, without changing the visible page.
- Related:Schema markupsameAs
- Knowledge Graph
- The Knowledge Graph is Google's database of entities and the relationships between them, used to power knowledge panels and to understand what queries refer to. Being recognized as an entity in it helps Google connect your brand with the topics, people and places you are associated with.
- Related:EntityWikidatasameAs
- LLM (Large Language Model)
- An LLM is an AI model trained on large amounts of text to predict and generate language. GPT, Gemini and Claude are examples. On their own, LLMs answer from training data; inside search products they are combined with retrieval so they can read and cite current web pages.
- Related:RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)GroundingHallucination
- llms.txt
- llms.txt is a proposed Markdown file at a site's root that gives language models a short summary and a curated list of key pages. It is a community proposal, not a standard. Support among major answer engines is uneven, and Google has said it does not use it.
- Related:OAI-SearchBotCrawl budget
- OAI-SearchBot
- OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's crawler for ChatGPT search. Allowing it in robots.txt lets your pages appear and be cited in ChatGPT search answers. It is separate from GPTBot, the training crawler, so you can block training while staying visible in search.
- Related:llms.txtCrawl budgetCitation
- Prompt tracking
- Prompt tracking is running a fixed set of buyer questions through AI assistants on a schedule and recording whether your brand is mentioned, cited and how it is described. Because answers vary between runs, it relies on repeated checks across many prompts to show reliable trends.
- Related:Share of voice (AI)Brand mention
- RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
- RAG is a technique where an AI system first retrieves relevant documents, then uses them as context to write its answer. AI search engines work this way, which is why being retrievable and having clear, quotable passages matters for visibility.
- Related:GroundingLLM (Large Language Model)Citation
- sameAs
- sameAs is a schema.org property that lists the official profiles of an entity, such as its LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Wikidata or Crunchbase pages. It tells search engines and AI systems that these profiles all describe the same company, strengthening entity recognition.
- Related:Schema markupEntityWikidata
- Schema markup
- Schema markup is structured data using the schema.org vocabulary that describes a page's content in machine-readable form, such as Organization, Article, Product, Service or FAQPage. It helps engines parse facts accurately but does not replace content that answers the question well.
- Related:JSON-LDsameAsAnswer-first content
- Wikidata
- Wikidata is a free, structured knowledge base run by the Wikimedia Foundation that stores facts about entities. Search engines and AI systems draw on it. A notable company with an accurate Wikidata item, linked through sameAs, is easier for engines to identify, though notability rules apply.
- Related:Knowledge GraphEntitysameAs
- Zero-click search
- A zero-click search is one where the user gets what they need on the results page or in an AI answer and does not visit any website. AI Overviews and assistants increase this pattern, which is why being named and cited in the answer itself has become a goal in its own right.
- Related:AI OverviewsBrand mentionCitation
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