GEO and AEO glossary

Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so that answer engines, such as AI assistants, voice assistants and featured snippets, can extract a direct answer from it. It overlaps heavily with GEO; AEO emphasizes concise, answer-first content and structured data.

An AI crawler is an automated program that fetches web pages for an AI company, either to train models, to build a search index for an assistant, or to open a page when a user asks. Each identifies itself with a user-agent name you can allow or block in robots.txt.

AI Overviews are generated summaries that Google Search shows at the top of some results pages, with links to the sources used. They answer a query directly, so users may read the summary instead of clicking. Appearing as a cited source is the main visibility goal.

An answer engine is a search product that responds to a question with a direct, written answer instead of a list of links. ChatGPT with search, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google's AI Overviews all work this way. Visibility inside the answer replaces ranking on a results page.

A brand mention in AI search is any time an assistant names your brand in an answer, whether or not it links to you. Mentions show whether assistants consider you relevant for a question. Tracking where you are mentioned, and in what position, is the basis of AI visibility.

A citation is a link or source reference that an AI assistant shows next to its answer to indicate where information came from. Being cited means one of your pages was used as a source. It differs from a mention, where the assistant names your brand without necessarily linking to you.

ClaudeBot is Anthropic's web crawler. It collects public web content that may contribute to training Anthropic's Claude models. Site owners control it through a ClaudeBot rule in robots.txt. Anthropic also operates Claude-SearchBot, which supports search results in Claude, and a user-triggered fetcher.

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. It is a framework from Google's search quality guidelines that human raters use to judge content quality. It is not a single ranking factor, but it describes qualities that also help content earn trust from people and AI systems.

An entity is a distinct, identifiable thing, such as a company, product, person or place, that search and AI systems can recognize and connect facts to. For brands, a clear entity means consistent name, description and profiles across the web, so assistants know who you are.

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of making a brand easy for AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude to find, understand and recommend. The goal is to be named, and cited, inside generated answers rather than only ranked in a list of links.

Google-Extended is a robots.txt control token that lets site owners tell Google whether their content may be used for Gemini models and for grounding in Gemini. It is not a separate crawler, and blocking it does not affect how your site is crawled or ranked in Google Search.

GPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler. It collects publicly available pages that may be used to train OpenAI's models. Website owners can allow or block it with a GPTBot rule in robots.txt. It is separate from OAI-SearchBot, which supports ChatGPT search, and from ChatGPT-User.

Grounding is connecting an AI model's answer to external sources, such as live web search results, so that statements are based on retrieved documents rather than only on training data. Grounded answers can show citations, which is why they matter for brand visibility.

A listicle is an article built around a list, such as "best CRM tools for small teams". AI assistants often cite such lists when asked for recommendations. Being included on credible third-party lists can raise your visibility, while self-published lists are discounted by readers and may be by assistants.

LLM SEO is an informal name for optimizing a website so that large language model assistants mention and cite it. It is used interchangeably with GEO and AEO. The practical work combines classic SEO fundamentals with clear facts, comparison content and a presence on the sources assistants rely on.

llms.txt is a proposed convention: a plain Markdown file at the root of a website that summarizes the site and links to its key pages for AI systems. It is not an enforced standard, and independent studies have found no clear link between having one and being cited more often.

PerplexityBot is the crawler Perplexity uses to build the search index behind its answers. Allowing it lets Perplexity retrieve and cite your pages. Blocking it in robots.txt keeps your content out of that index, which can reduce your chances of being named or linked in Perplexity answers.

Prompt tracking means asking AI assistants a fixed set of realistic questions on a schedule and recording the answers: which brands are named, in which order and from which sources. Repeating the same questions over time reveals trends that a single screenshot cannot show.

Query fan-out is when an AI system turns one user question into several related search queries, runs them in parallel and combines the results into one answer. It means a brand can be retrieved through sub-questions the user never typed, such as price, alternatives or reviews.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a technique where an AI system first retrieves relevant documents, for example from a search index, and then generates an answer using them. It reduces reliance on training data and lets answers include current information and source links.

Schema markup is structured data added to a web page, usually as JSON-LD using the schema.org vocabulary, that states in machine-readable form what the page is about: an organization, product, FAQ, article or defined term. It helps search engines and other systems interpret pages accurately.

Sentiment in AI answers describes whether an assistant talks about your brand in a positive, neutral or negative way. A mention can come with praise, caveats or warnings. Reading the wording around your name shows how assistants characterise you, beyond simply whether you are named.

Share of voice in AI is your brand's mentions divided by all brand mentions across a set of AI answers. If assistants name ten brands a hundred times in total and yours appears twenty times, your share of voice is 20 percent. It shows how you compare to competitors.

A visibility score summarizes how prominently AI assistants recommend a brand across a set of questions. Nodpick gives 100 points for being named first, 80 for second, 60 for third, 40 for later positions and 0 when absent, and averages them over all answers.

Zero-click search describes a search where the user gets the answer directly on the results page or in the assistant and does not click through to any website. AI Overviews and chat assistants increase it. In a zero-click world, being named in the answer matters as much as ranking.