The AI search glossary
The vocabulary of getting cited by AI, defined in plain English. 16 terms that show up when people talk about GEO, AEO, answer engines and how brands earn a place inside AI-generated answers.
A
AI Overviews
Google's AI-generated answer that appears above the classic search results, with cited sources.
An answer engine responds to a query with a synthesized answer and a short list of cited sources, rather than a page of links. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews are answer engines. Read the full definition.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)AEO
Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of structuring content so answer engines can extract a direct, self-contained answer from it, which increases the chance of being cited. Read the full definition.
Answer Presence
Whether your brand appears at all in the answer for a given prompt, before you measure how prominently.
C
Citation share is the percentage of AI answers for a set of tracked prompts that name or cite your brand. It is the headline metric for AI search visibility. Read the full definition.
E
E-E-A-T
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust: Google's framework for judging content quality, and a strong signal for being cited.
F
Featured Snippet
A short answer Google lifts to the top of results; these often become the source an AI answer quotes.
G
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)GEO
Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of getting a brand cited and recommended inside AI-generated answers, by shaping content so answer engines retrieve, trust, and quote it. Read the full definition.
Grounding
Tying a model answer to retrieved, verifiable sources so it can cite them and reduce hallucination.
K
Knowledge Graph
A network of entities and their relationships that engines use to understand and disambiguate brands and topics.
L
llms.txt
A proposed plain-text file that gives AI crawlers a clean, curated map of a site's most important content.
Q
Query Fan-out
When an AI engine issues several related sub-searches for one prompt, then synthesizes the results into a single answer.
R
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)RAG
A technique where a model retrieves relevant documents and generates an answer grounded in them, attaching citations to what it used.
S
Share of Voice
Your brand presence across AI answers relative to the competitors named instead of you.
Speakable
A schema.org property that marks the passages of a page best suited to be read aloud, useful for answer extraction.
Structured Data
Machine-readable markup (such as JSON-LD schema) that tells engines what a page is about and how to reuse it.