GEO glossary

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Plain-English definitions of the terms used in generative engine optimization and AI search. New to the topic? Start with What is GEO?

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AEO (answer engine optimization)

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Another name for GEO: improving how a brand appears in answers from AI assistants and answer engines.

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AI crawler

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A bot that AI companies use to read web pages, for training or for live answers. Examples: GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot (Perplexity) and Google-Extended (Google).

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Answer engine

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A search tool that replies with a written answer instead of a list of links, often with citations. Perplexity is a well-known example.

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Citation

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A link to a source shown alongside an AI answer, indicating where information came from.

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Competitor benchmark

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A comparison of how often AI answers mention or recommend each brand in a category.

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GEO (generative engine optimization)

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The practice of making a brand visible and accurately described in AI-generated answers.

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Google-Extended

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A robots.txt user agent that controls whether Google may use a site's content for its Gemini models.

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Grounding

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Basing an AI answer on retrieved documents rather than only on what the model learned in training.

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Hallucination

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An AI answer that states something false or unsupported, such as a feature a product doesn't have.

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LLM (large language model)

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The type of AI model behind assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok.

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llms.txt

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A proposed plain-text file at a site's root that gives AI systems a short summary of the site and links to its most useful pages.

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Prompt

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A question or instruction given to an AI assistant. In GEO, a prompt is a buyer question you track, such as "best CRM for small agencies".

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RAG (retrieval-augmented generation)

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A technique where an AI system searches for relevant documents and uses them to write its answer.

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robots.txt

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A file at a site's root that tells crawlers which pages they may visit. It can allow or block specific AI crawlers.

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Sentiment

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Whether an answer describes a brand positively, neutrally or negatively.

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Share of voice

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A brand's share of all brand mentions across a set of AI answers.

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Structured data

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Machine-readable information added to a page (usually Schema.org JSON-LD) describing what the page is about.

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Top pick

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When an AI answer names a brand as its first or best recommendation.

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Visibility score

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The share of tracked AI answers that mention a brand.