GEO and AI visibility glossary
AI visibility and Generative Engine Optimization come with a lot of new terms. Below are clear explanations of the most important ones, from GEO and prompt tracker to citations, share of voice and llms.txt. New to the topic? Start with what is GEO. The practical steps to make your site readable for AI are in how AI crawlers read your site.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
- Optimizing your website and content so that generative AI search engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity mention and recommend your business as a source in their answers.
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
- Optimizing to appear as the answer in answer engines. In practice it largely overlaps with GEO; both are about being mentioned in AI answers.
- LLM (Large Language Model)
- A large language model that generates text based on patterns in training data, such as the models behind ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude.
- Prompt
- The question or instruction a user gives an AI. In AI visibility, the prompt replaces the keyword as the unit of measurement.
- Prompt tracker
- A tool that automatically tests prompts in AI platforms and measures whether and how your brand appears in the answers. See the GreatCompany prompt tracker.
- AI Overviews
- The AI-generated answers at the top of Google that summarize sources instead of only showing links.
- Mention
- An AI answer in which your business or brand is named, with or without a link. How often that happens for your customers' questions is the basis of measuring AI visibility.
- Citation
- A source reference or link an AI shows with an answer. Getting cited more often increases your visibility and traffic.
- Visibility score
- One number that summarizes how often and how prominently you are mentioned in AI answers, so you can follow it over time.
- Hallucination
- An incorrect or made-up answer from an AI. Hallucinations can arise about your brand; you want to monitor and correct them.
- llms.txt
- A text file in the root of your site that aims to help AI systems find your most important content. Its effect on AI search is still limited and evolving.
- Structured data (schema)
- Structured markup (JSON-LD) that helps search engines and AI understand your content, such as Product, FAQ and Article.
- AI crawler
- A bot from an AI platform that fetches your pages to read content and use it in answers, such as GPTBot and PerplexityBot.
- Grounding
- Backing up an AI answer with real sources from the web, instead of relying on the model alone.
- RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
- A technique where an AI first retrieves relevant sources and uses them to generate an answer. It explains why good, findable content matters.
- Agentic commerce
- Shopping where an AI agent not only recommends but also helps complete the purchase, often through product cards in the AI interface.
- Sentiment
- The tone in which an AI talks about your brand, from positive to negative. Part of brand monitoring in AI.
- Prompt-first content strategy
- Creating content from the questions customers ask AI, instead of from loose keywords.
- Question cluster
- A group of related questions around one intent. In GEO you optimize per cluster instead of per keyword.
- E-E-A-T
- Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. Signals of reliability that affect whether AI uses you as a source.
- SSR (Server-Side Rendering)
- The HTML of a page is generated on the server, so crawlers and AI see the content right away without running JavaScript.
- Sponsored card
- A paid product card inside an AI answer. The ad format ChatGPT uses.
- AI Mode (Google)
- Google's conversational search mode, where you ask follow-up questions and get AI answers instead of a list of links. Different from AI Overviews: that is a summary above the regular results, AI Mode is a full conversation.
- Attribution
- Assigning a lead or revenue to a channel. Harder in GEO than in SEO, because an AI answer often brings no click but does influence the purchase.
- Branded search
- Searches for your own brand name. An increase is one of the strongest indirect signals that your AI visibility works: people hear about you through AI and look you up afterwards.
- Bot blocking
- Keeping crawlers out through robots.txt, a firewall or IP filtering. A trap in GEO: block AI crawlers too strictly and you become invisible in AI answers.
- ChatGPT Search
- The search function within ChatGPT that retrieves current information from the web to answer a question, instead of relying only on training data.
- Chunking
- Splitting a page into smaller pieces that an AI can retrieve and cite separately. Clear headings and well-defined paragraphs increase the chance the right piece is found.
- Citation rate
- The percentage of relevant questions where your site is named as a source. One of the most important numbers in GEO.
- Conversational search
- Searching in natural language, with full questions instead of loose keywords. This is the standard in AI search engines and the reason you optimize for prompts.
- Direct answer
- An answer the user gets right away without clicking through. In GEO you want your information to form that answer, including a source reference.
- Embedding
- A mathematical representation of text as a series of numbers, which AI uses to compare meaning. It explains why AI also finds content that does not literally contain your keyword.
- Entity
- A recognizable concept, person or business in the eyes of AI. Once you are recognized as an entity, AI can mention you consistently. See also entity disambiguation.
- Entity disambiguation
- Determining which entity is meant by a name with several meanings. Important if your brand name is also a common word or another company.
- Featured snippet
- A highlighted answer box above the regular Google results. The predecessor of AI Overviews: the same logic, different packaging.
- Fine-tuning
- Further training an existing AI model on specific data. Not something you steer as a business, but useful to know in conversations about AI.
- Foundation model
- A large, pre-trained model on which applications are built, such as GPT, Claude and Gemini. The foundation under the AI search engines you want to be visible in.
- Generative engine
- A search engine that generates answers instead of only showing links. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and AI Overviews are generative engines. The G in GEO.
- GPTBot
- The OpenAI crawler that collects content for training models. Blocking it reduces your chance of being mentioned in ChatGPT.
- OAI-SearchBot
- The OpenAI crawler for ChatGPT Search. Unlike GPTBot (training), this bot decides whether you appear in current search answers.
- Inference
- The moment a model processes a question and generates an answer. Every prompt is an inference.
- Information gain
- The unique value your content adds on top of what already exists. AI prefers to cite a source that says something new over yet another repetition.
- Knowledge Graph
- Google's structured database of entities and their relationships. Appearing in it strengthens how recognizable you are to AI.
- Knowledge Panel
- The information box next to Google's search results about a recognized entity. A sign that you are recorded as an entity.
- Long-tail query
- A specific, longer question with less volume but much higher intent, such as which accounting software fits a contractor who is self-employed. Exactly where AI search excels.
- Machine-readable content
- Content that not only people but also machines can read in a structured way: schema markup, clear headings and plain facts.
- Multimodal
- A model that processes more than text: images, audio and video too. Relevant because you want your images and videos to be findable as well.
- NLP (natural language processing)
- The field that lets computers understand human language. The underlying technology that lets you ask a question instead of typing a keyword.
- Offer object
- Structured data with price, availability and conditions, which AI agents use to show and sell your product. The basis for agentic commerce.
- Perplexity
- An AI search engine that gives answers with a visible source for every claim. Because of that transparency it is easy to measure and influence.
- Prompt appearance
- Measures which prompts you appear in the answer for. The GEO equivalent of keyword rankings.
- GEO ranking factors
- The factors that decide whether AI picks your content. Unlike SEO, factuality, structure, freshness and mentions elsewhere weigh more than backlinks.
- Retrieval
- Fetching relevant sources as the first step of an AI answer. If you are not retrieved here, you cannot be cited either.
- SGE (Search Generative Experience)
- The old name for Google's AI search feature, now AI Overviews. You still come across it in older articles.
- Semantic search
- Searching on meaning instead of exact words. That is why you do not need to work in every synonym, but you do need to really answer the question.
- Token
- The unit in which a model processes text, roughly a word or part of a word. Among other things it determines how much context a model can take in.
- Training data
- The text a model was trained on. It determines what the model knows on its own. GEO focuses mainly on what the model retrieves live, not on training data.
- Vector database
- A database that stores and searches embeddings. The memory behind RAG systems.
- WAF (web application firewall)
- A security layer for your site. Set too strictly, it blocks AI crawlers and makes you invisible by accident.
- Zero-click search
- A search where nobody clicks through because the answer is already shown. The core reason why visibility in the answer itself counts.
From terms to results
Measure with the prompt tracker whether AI mentions your business.
Further reading
See whether ChatGPT mentions your business.
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