GEO & AI search, term by term
Every key term defined in two sentences. Written to be clear for you and citable by the AI itself. Deep guides linked where they exist.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
The practice of optimizing a business so it is cited and recommended inside AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, rather than only ranked on a results page.
Full guide →AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
Structuring content so it is selected as the direct answer an engine returns: featured snippets, answer boxes, voice results and concise AI replies.
Full guide →AIO (AI Optimization)
The umbrella term for optimizing visibility across all AI-driven search surfaces, running SEO, AEO and GEO as one connected system.
Full guide →llms.txt
A proposed plain-text Markdown file at a site's root that states what the business is, in its own words. As of September 2026 no major AI platform has documented reading it.
Full guide →Entity SEO
Optimizing a business to be understood as one connected entity, category, location, people, services, rather than a scattered set of keywords.
Full guide →Citation share
The percentage of AI answers in a category that name your business versus competitors. The core success metric of GEO, the AI-era equivalent of ranking position.
AI Overviews
Google's AI-generated summaries at the top of search results, assembled from the Google index. Being cited in them is a primary GEO target.
Answer engine
Any system that returns a direct answer instead of a list of links: AI assistants, voice assistants, and answer boxes on results pages.
Structured data
Machine-readable code (usually JSON-LD) added to pages that tells engines and AI exactly what the content is: an article, a service, a review, an organization.
JSON-LD
The JSON-based format Google recommends for structured data. It lives in a script tag and describes the page's entities without touching visible content.
Schema.org
The shared vocabulary of types (Organization, Person, FAQPage, Service) used in structured data, maintained jointly by the major search engines.
Knowledge graph
A search engine's internal database of entities and their relationships. Being a recognized entity in it makes AI reason about you with confidence.
sameAs
A schema property linking your entity to its official profiles (LinkedIn, social accounts), proving that scattered mentions across the web are one and the same business.
Answer-first content
Writing where each section states its answer in the first sentence, making the passage extractable on its own. What AI lifts into responses.
Extractability
How easily an AI can lift a self-contained passage from your page and use it in an answer. Short declarative paragraphs and clear headings raise it.
AI crawler
A bot that reads the web for an AI system, for training (GPTBot, ClaudeBot), search answers (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot) or user requests (ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, Perplexity-User). Blocking a search bot keeps you out of that engine's answers; blocking a training bot does not.
GPTBot
OpenAI's training crawler. Blocking it keeps your content out of model training, not out of ChatGPT search, which uses OAI-SearchBot.
Zero-click search
A search resolved entirely on the results page or in the AI answer, with no click to any website. Why being IN the answer now beats being under it.
Prompt-based discovery
Buyers finding businesses by asking AI assistants directly ('who should I hire for X') instead of browsing search results. The behavior shift GEO answers.
E-E-A-T
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness: Google's quality framework. The same signals feed how much AI systems trust and cite a source.
Digital PR
Earning mentions, links and coverage on third-party sites. In GEO, it is how you answer the trust question, because AI weighs what others say about you.
Topical authority
Depth and consistency of coverage on one subject that makes engines treat you as a go-to source for the whole topic, not just one page.
Rich snippet
An enhanced search result showing extra data (product review stars, breadcrumbs, event details) drawn from structured data. Google stopped showing FAQ rich results on 7 May 2026 and HowTo in September 2023.
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