GEO glossary
44 terms you will meet when working on AI visibility, each explained in a sentence or two, with a link to the guide that goes deeper.
A
- AEO
- Answer engine optimization. An older, closely related name for making content easy for answer boxes, voice assistants and AI apps to quote. Read the guide →
- AI Overviews
- Google's AI-written summaries shown at the top of some search results, with links to the pages used. Google says they rely on normal Search indexing. Read the guide →
- Answer box
- A 50 to 100 word direct answer placed right under a page's title, written to make sense if quoted on its own. Read the guide →
B
- Being listed
- Being included on a third-party page such as a list, directory or review site. Paid sites to be listed on must be clearly disclosed. Read the guide →
- Blind question
- A tracking question that never names your brand, domain or products, so the answer reflects what a real buyer would hear. Read the guide →
C
- Citation
- A source page that an AI app links to or lists as used for its answer. Read the guide →
- Citation rate
- The share of checks in which a page on your own domain is one of the AI app's sources. Read the guide →
- Confidence interval
- A range that shows how uncertain a measured rate is. A 95% interval is built so that, over many samples, it would contain the true rate 95% of the time. Read the guide →
- Control group
- Similar questions you deliberately do not work on, so you can tell whether a change came from your work or from something outside it. Read the guide →
- Crawler
- A program that fetches web pages automatically. AI companies run separate crawlers for search and for model training. Read the guide →
- Credit
- A unit of usage in a metered product. In GEO tools, credits usually pay for AI app checks or drafted pages.
E
- E-E-A-T
- Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Ideas from Google's guidance on helpful, reliable content. Read the guide →
- Entity
- A distinct thing an AI app can recognise, such as a company, product or person, as opposed to just a keyword. Read the guide →
- Entity sentence
- One plain sentence stating who you are, what you sell and who it is for, used consistently across your site and profiles. Read the guide →
F
- Fact sheet
- A single, checked record of your business facts: products, prices with dates, locations and key features. Every page and profile should agree with it. Read the guide →
- FAQPage
- A schema.org type for pages with a list of questions and answers. The markup should match the visible FAQ exactly. Read the guide →
- Forced search
- Asking an AI app to run a live web search before answering, and recording whether it actually did. Read the guide →
G
- GEO
- Generative engine optimization. The work of getting your business named, described correctly and cited in answers from AI apps. Read the guide →
- Google-Extended
- A robots.txt token that controls use of your content for Gemini Apps and Vertex AI. Google says it does not affect Search inclusion. Read the guide →
- Grounding
- Basing an AI answer on documents fetched for the question, such as live search results, instead of only on training data. Read the guide →
- Group of questions
- A group of buyer questions about the same job, such as pricing, comparisons or local options. Read the guide →
H
- Hallucination
- A confident statement from an AI app that is false or not supported by its sources. Read the guide →
- hreflang
- An HTML or sitemap annotation that tells search engines which language or regional version of a page to show. Read the guide →
I
- IS 19000:2022
- An Indian Standard from BIS setting principles for collecting, moderating and publishing online consumer reviews. The government describes it as voluntary. Read the guide →
J
- JSON-LD
- A format for adding structured data to a page as a script block, using the schema.org vocabulary. Google recommends it. Read the guide →
L
- Listicle
- A "best of" list article naming several products or companies. AI apps often cite them for recommendation questions. Read the guide →
- llms.txt
- A proposed markdown file at a site's root that gives language models a short guide and key links. Optional, and not required by the major AI apps. Read the guide →
M
- Mention rate
- The share of checks in which an AI app names your brand, or a known alias, in its answer. Read the guide →
N
- NAP consistency
- Keeping your name, address and phone identical across your site and every directory listing. Read the guide →
- Non-determinism
- The fact that the same question can get a different answer on each run, which is why single screenshots prove little. Read the guide →
O
- OAI-SearchBot
- OpenAI's crawler for ChatGPT search. OpenAI says sites that block it are not shown in ChatGPT search answers. Read the guide →
P
- Position
- Where your name first appears in the ordered list of names in an answer, counting from 1. Read the guide →
- Priority
- How important a tracked question is. Priority 1 questions are closest to a purchase and are checked most often. Read the guide →
Q
- Question universe
- The full set of buyer questions you watch for a business, grouped by what the buyer is trying to do. Read the guide →
R
- Reusing a recent answer
- Reusing a recent answer to the exact same question, AI app and country instead of asking again, while scoring each brand separately. Read the guide →
- robots.txt
- A file at your site's root that tells crawlers which paths they may fetch. The format is standardised in RFC 9309. Read the guide →
S
- Schema.org
- A shared vocabulary for structured data, with types such as Organization, Product, Article, FAQPage and Dataset. Read the guide →
- SERP
- Search engine results page. The page of links, ads and features a search engine shows for a query. Read the guide →
- Your brand mentions divided by all brand mentions across a set of questions. Useful for comparing with named competitors. Read the guide →
- Source
- A page an AI app read to build its answer. Some sources are shown to the user as citations. Read the guide →
T
- Training data
- The text a model learned from before release. Answers from memory reflect it, and only change when models are updated. Read the guide →
- Two-proportion test
- A statistical test for whether two rates really differ. A z score of 1.96 or more either way matches the 95% level. Read the guide →
W
- Wilson interval
- A way to compute a confidence interval for a rate that behaves well with small samples and with rates near 0% or 100%. Read the guide →
Z
- Zero-click
- A search where the user gets what they need on the results page or in an AI answer and does not click through to any site. Read the guide →
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