AI Search Glossary
A comprehensive guide to AI Search, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), and AI visibility terminology.
AI Brand Mentions
Instances where an AI assistant references your brand by name in a generated answer, even without linking to your content.
AI Citations
Instances where an AI platform explicitly credits your content as the source for its answer, often with a clickable link or footnote.
AI Crawlers
Automated bots deployed by AI companies to read, index, and retrieve website content for use in training data, search indexes, and real-time AI-generated answers.
AI Search Optimization
The practice of optimizing content so that AI-powered search engines and assistants understand, cite, and recommend your brand in their answers.
AI Search Visibility
A metric measuring how often and how prominently a brand appears in AI-generated search responses.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
The practice of optimizing content to appear as direct answers in AI-powered answer engines, chatbots, and voice assistants.
Brand Visibility Score
The percentage of relevant AI-generated answers in which your brand is mentioned by name, with or without a link.
Citation Rate
The percentage of relevant AI-generated answers that explicitly reference or link to your content as a source.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
The practice of improving how brands and content are retrieved, cited, and recommended inside AI-generated answers.
Generative Search Optimization (GSO)
An alternative term for optimizing content so AI-powered search engines recognize, trust, and cite your brand in their generated answers.
Google AI Overviews
AI-generated answer summaries displayed at the top of Google search results that synthesize information from multiple web sources.
Large Language Model (LLM)
An AI system trained on vast amounts of text data that can generate human-like responses, power AI search engines, and synthesize information from multiple sources.
llms.txt
A standardized markdown file at a website's root that tells AI models which content is most important and where to find clean, machine-readable versions of key pages.
Query Fan-Out
The process where AI search engines split a single user question into multiple sub-queries, retrieve data for each, and combine the results into one synthesized answer.
Share of Voice (AI Search)
A competitive metric that compares your brand's visibility in AI-generated answers relative to competitors in the same topic set.
Structured Data for AI
Machine-readable markup (primarily JSON-LD and Schema.org) added to web pages to help AI models understand, extract, and cite your content accurately.
Topical Authority
The perceived expertise and trustworthiness a brand has on a specific subject, as evaluated by both search engines and AI models.
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