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AEO glossary
Plain-English definitions for the terms behind AI-search visibility. New to this? Start with What is AEO →
- AEO — Answer Engine Optimization
- Optimizing your brand and site to be mentioned and cited by AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Grok).
- GEO — Generative Engine Optimization
- A near-synonym for AEO, emphasising visibility inside generative AI answers. Often used interchangeably.
- AI answer engine
- A system that returns a synthesized answer (not a list of links) and cites a few sources — e.g. ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity.
- AI Overview
- Google's AI-generated answer shown above the classic results for many queries, citing a handful of pages.
- Share of voice (SoV)
- The percentage of relevant AI answers in which your brand is mentioned, versus competitors. AEOX's headline metric.
- Citation
- A source link an AI engine attaches to its answer. Being cited drives both visibility and referral traffic.
- Mention rate
- How often your brand is named in answers to a set of buyer-intent prompts, whether or not it's linked.
- RAG — Retrieval-Augmented Generation
- The technique most answer engines use: retrieve live pages from an index, then generate an answer grounded in them. Why indexability matters for AEO.
- Entity optimization
- Making your brand an unambiguous, verifiable entity to engines via
Organizationschema,sameAslinks and a Wikidata/Wikipedia presence. - Evidence density
- The amount of sourced, citable proof (statistics, citations, quotes) on a page — a top lever for being cited.
- llms.txt
- A proposed plain-text file at your site root that gives AI agents a curated map of your key pages. Generate one free →
- Markdown twin
- A clean Markdown version of a page served to AI agents, easier for them to parse than rendered HTML.
- AI-bot access
- Whether crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended are allowed in your
robots.txt. Check yours → - Buyer-intent prompts
- The "best X for Y" questions real buyers ask AI — the queries AEO targets.
- Structured data / JSON-LD
- Schema.org markup that tells engines what a page is about (Organization, Product, FAQ, Article…).