The AEO glossary.
Twenty terms you will meet in AI search, defined in one or two sentences each.
- AEO (answer engine optimization)
- Making a business easy for AI assistants to find, understand, trust and quote.
- AI Overview
- Google’s AI-generated summary shown above search results, with linked sources.
- AI Mode
- Google’s conversational search mode with longer, multi-step AI answers.
- Answer-first content
- A page structure that puts a direct, quotable answer immediately under each question heading.
- Citation
- A link to a source shown inside or beside an AI answer.
- Citation rate
- Share of tracked prompts where an engine links to your page.
- Entity
- A uniquely identifiable thing, such as your company, that search engines and models recognise.
- GEO (generative engine optimization)
- Shaping how large language models describe and recommend a brand.
- Grounding
- When a model bases its answer on retrieved web sources rather than memory alone.
- IndexNow
- A protocol that tells Bing and other engines immediately when a URL changes.
- JSON-LD
- The script format used to add schema.org structured data to a page.
- llms.txt
- A proposed file listing a site’s key pages for language models; not a confirmed ranking signal.
- Mention rate
- Share of tracked prompts where an engine names your brand.
- OAI-SearchBot
- OpenAI’s crawler for ChatGPT search results, separate from the GPTBot training crawler.
- Prompt panel
- A fixed set of buyer questions run in each engine on a schedule to measure visibility.
- RAG (retrieval-augmented generation)
- A model architecture that retrieves documents before writing an answer.
- Schema markup
- Structured data from schema.org that labels what a page is about.
- How often you are named versus competitors for the same prompts.
- Source map
- The list of domains engines cite for your prompts, ranked by frequency.
- Zero-click search
- A search that ends without a click because the answer was shown on the results page.
Start with a free AEO check.
We run a sample of your buyer prompts across the major AI engines and send you what they say, who they cite and where you are missing.