Glossary
Clear definitions of the AEO, GEO, and AI search terms that shape how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini represent your brand — defined and kept current.
A
An umbrella term for optimizing a brand's content and data so it is accurately represented and cited across all AI-driven search and assistant surfaces.
Google's AI-generated summary that appears above traditional search results, synthesizing information from multiple sources into a direct answer.
A measure of how present and prominent your brand is across AI-generated answers for your category, often relative to competitors.
A written description of an image in a page's HTML, used by screen readers and search engines to understand what the image shows.
The visible, clickable words of a hyperlink, which give readers and search engines a clue about the linked page's topic.
A system that responds to a query with a direct, synthesized answer rather than a ranked list of links — for example ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews.
The practice of optimizing content so AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overview cite your brand when answering user questions.
B
A link from one website to another. Backlinks act as votes of confidence that help search engines judge a site's authority.
Test queries that name your brand directly, used to measure how accurately and favorably AI assistants describe you when they already know who you are.
C
An HTML tag that tells search engines which version of a page is the preferred one when similar or duplicate versions exist.
OpenAI's conversational AI assistant that answers questions in natural language and, with search enabled, retrieves and cites live web sources.
A citation is a link an AI assistant attaches to its answer, crediting a specific URL as a source for what it just said.
The frequency with which an AI answer engine cites or references your brand or content for a defined set of target queries.
Structuring content into self-contained, clearly-labeled sections so AI systems can extract and cite a specific passage without needing the whole page.
The process by which search engines use automated bots to discover and read pages across the web.
E
Google's quality framework — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness — used to assess content quality and increasingly relevant to whether AI systems trust a source.
Numerical representations of text that capture meaning, allowing AI systems to match a query to relevant content based on semantic similarity rather than exact keywords.
G
The discipline of structuring content and online presence to improve how a brand is represented and cited in responses generated by AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
Google's chat-style AI search interface offering multi-turn conversation, deeper synthesis, and aggressive query fan-out, distinct from the AI Overview box.
Google's family of AI models powering its conversational assistant and AI search features, including AI Overviews and AI Mode.
OpenAI's web crawler, which gathers content used to train and inform its models; site owners can allow or block it via robots.txt.
The verified, authoritative set of facts about a business — used as the benchmark against which an AI model's statements are scored for accuracy.
The practice of tying an AI model's response to verifiable external sources, reducing fabrication and allowing the answer to cite where its information came from.
I
K
A word or phrase that people type into a search engine, and that businesses target so their content appears for those searches.
A structured network of entities (people, places, businesses, concepts) and the relationships between them, used by search engines and AI systems to understand the world.
L
An AI model trained on vast amounts of text to understand and generate human-like language, forming the engine behind tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude.
A proposed standard file placed at a site's root that offers AI systems a curated, plain-text map of the site's most important content.
M
S
Structured data added to a web page using a shared vocabulary (schema.org) that explicitly tells search engines and AI systems what the content means.
The practice of improving a website so it appears higher in search engine results for relevant queries, earning more organic (unpaid) traffic.
The page a search engine shows after a query, listing the results — including organic links, ads, and features like snippets, maps, and AI summaries.
A file that lists a website's important pages, helping search engines discover and crawl them efficiently.