Glossary
The AI search visibility glossary.
AEO, GEO, share of voice, AI Overviews. The whole alphabet soup, in plain English, defined the way we'd explain it to a friend.
- AI search visibility
- How often, and how well, your brand shows up when buyers ask an AI engine for a recommendation. The plain-English name for AEO and GEO.
- Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
- The practice of getting your brand mentioned, recommended, and cited inside the answers AI engines give, instead of just ranking a blue link on Google.
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
- Optimizing your content and presence so generative AI like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity quote or recommend you in the answers they produce. For most businesses it means the same thing as AEO.
- Answer engine
- Any tool that answers a question directly instead of returning a list of links. Examples: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, and Google's AI Overviews.
- AI Overviews
- Google's AI-generated answer that sits at the top of search results and often resolves the query without a click. Being cited in it is a major visibility win.
- Share of voice
- Across the questions your buyers ask AI, how often the engines name you versus a competitor. The metric that replaces traffic as the scoreboard for AI search.
- Citation
- When an AI engine names your brand or links to your page as a source inside its answer. Citations are to AI search what rankings are to Google.
- Zero-click search
- A search that ends with the answer shown on screen and no click to any website. More than half of searches now end this way, which is why being in the answer matters more than ranking for the link.
- llms.txt
- A simple text file at the root of your site that points AI models to your most important pages. Low-effort, low-risk hygiene that helps AI read and understand you.
- AI crawlers
- The bots AI engines use to read the web, like GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), and PerplexityBot. If your robots.txt blocks them, you cannot appear in those engines' answers.
- Entity / sameAs
- How AI ties your brand to its known profiles (LinkedIn, Crunchbase, social accounts). Consistent, linked entity signals help models trust and disambiguate you.
- Prompt tracking
- Monitoring the specific questions buyers type into AI engines to see when your brand gets named, how it is described, and where a competitor wins instead.
Now find out where you stand.
See whether the engines actually recommend you, free.