63 terms

GEO GlossaryGEO Terms A–Z

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is about making content discoverable, understandable and citable for AI-powered search and answer engines. This section collects concepts such as entities, knowledge graphs, structured data, citations and AI crawlers.

GEO does not replace SEO; it builds on foundations like crawlability and indexability. The definitions avoid unverifiable claims about the internals of generative engines.

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AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is an industry term for work aimed at getting content used as the source in systems that answer questions directly: featured snippets, voice assistants and AI-powered search answers. It is not a standard defined by any official body, and it overlaps heavily with GEO, featured snippet optimization and conventional SEO rather than replacing them.
AI CitationAn AI citation is a link, footnote or source card in an answer generated by an AI-powered search or answer system that shows which web page the information came from. Citations let users verify claims and are the main route by which websites gain visibility and traffic from AI answers. Being selected as a cited source is never guaranteed.
AI CrawlerAn AI crawler is a bot operated by an AI company that visits web pages and retrieves their content. AI crawlers serve three main purposes: collecting content for model training (GPTBot, ClaudeBot), building an index for AI search (OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot), and fetching a page on demand when a user asks (ChatGPT-User). Most can be managed with robots.txt rules.
AI Mode (Google)AI Mode is a conversational AI search experience offered as a separate tab in Google Search. It breaks complex, multi-part questions into subtopics, runs searches for them simultaneously and combines the findings into one response with links to supporting websites, and it lets users ask follow-up questions. It started as a Labs experiment in March 2025 and opened to everyone in the US in May 2025.
AI OverviewsAI Overviews is a Google Search feature that shows an AI-generated summary, together with links to supporting web pages, above the regular results for some queries. It began in 2023 as the Search Labs experiment SGE (Search Generative Experience) and rolled out to all users in the United States in May 2024. It appears only when Google's systems judge that it adds value beyond classic results.
AI SearchAI search is a search experience that responds to a question with an answer written by a large language model instead of only a list of links. The system typically breaks the question into several searches, retrieves relevant web pages and presents a synthesized answer together with source links. Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT search and Perplexity are examples.
AI Share of VoiceAI share of voice is a measure of how much space a brand takes up, relative to the competitors being tracked, in the answers AI systems give to a defined set of questions. It is usually calculated as the brand's mentions or citations divided by the total for all tracked brands in the same answers. Because answers vary from run to run, it is estimated by sampling rather than measured exactly.
AI VisibilityAI visibility describes how often a brand is mentioned, how accurately it is described and whether it is cited as a source in answers from AI-powered systems such as ChatGPT search, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Perplexity or Claude. Because these answers vary from one run to the next, it is measured by repeatedly sampling a set of prompts rather than by a single ranking.
Answer ExtractabilityAnswer extractability is how easily search engines and AI systems can locate information on a page and lift it out as a correct, self-contained answer. Passages that answer the question in their first sentence, clear headings, definitions, lists and tables all improve it. It does not guarantee a citation, but it makes content a more suitable candidate for being quoted.
Applebot-ExtendedApplebot-Extended is a secondary user agent Apple recognizes in robots.txt that lets web publishers opt out of their content being used to train Apple's general-purpose foundation models, which power generative AI features across Apple products including Apple Intelligence. According to Apple, Applebot-Extended does not crawl web pages; it only determines how data crawled by Applebot may be used, and disallowing it does not remove pages from search results.
Article SchemaArticle schema is structured data that describes a news story, blog post or article page using schema.org's Article, NewsArticle or BlogPosting types. It states the headline, authors, publication and modification dates and images explicitly. Google says it helps show better title text, images and date information for the article in search results. It has no required properties.

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DefinedTerm and DefinedTermSetDefinedTerm and DefinedTermSet are schema.org types: DefinedTerm represents a word, abbreviation or phrase with a formal definition, while DefinedTermSet represents the glossary, classification scheme or code list those terms belong to. A term links to its set through inDefinedTermSet, and the set lists its terms through hasDefinedTerm. Google has no rich result for these types; their purpose is to name concepts and definitions explicitly for machines.

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JSON-LDJSON-LD (JSON for Linking Data) is a W3C standard for expressing linked data in JSON syntax. On websites it is mostly used inside a script element of type application/ld+json to add structured data based on the schema.org vocabulary. Keywords such as @context, @type, @id and @graph describe entities and the relationships between them without touching the page's visible HTML.

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llms.txtllms.txt is a proposed file, published at a website's root or under a sub-path, that gives language models and AI agents a short Markdown summary of the site plus links to its most useful pages. Jeremy Howard published the proposal at llmstxt.org in September 2024. It is not an official standard, and Google Search does not use it.

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Machine-Readable ContentMachine-readable content is content whose meaning and structure software can extract reliably without human interpretation. On the web this means text served as real text rather than images, meaningful HTML elements, consistent formats for dates, prices and units, and structured data that matches the visible page. Search engines, AI systems and agents all read pages through this layer.

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Robots.txtRobots.txt is a plain text file published at the root of a site (for example https://example.com/robots.txt) that tells crawlers which URL paths they may crawl. It implements the Robots Exclusion Protocol, standardised as RFC 9309. It controls crawling, not indexing: a blocked URL can still appear in search results without a description if other pages link to it.

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WikidataWikidata is a free, multilingual knowledge base hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation and edited collaboratively by volunteers. Every concept, person or organization is stored as an item with a permanent identifier beginning with Q (a QID) and connected to other items and external databases through properties. Because its structured data is released under CC0, search engines, knowledge graphs and AI systems can reuse it freely.

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Zero-Click SearchA zero-click search is a search that ends without the user clicking through to any website from the results page. It typically happens when the answer is shown on the page itself, for example in a featured snippet, knowledge panel, calculator or AI-generated overview, but it also covers searches the user refines or abandons because nothing suitable appeared.

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