GEO terms in the glossary

An AI citation is a source reference an AI search engine attaches to its answer, typically as a clickable link to the web page the information came from.

AI Overview is Google's AI-generated answer block that appears above search results, summarising information from multiple sources.

AEO is optimisation for search engines that return direct answers instead of links, aiming to appear as a source in the summarising answer.

ChatGPT is OpenAI's conversational AI assistant, one of the largest AI search channels worldwide and a primary GEO target.

Claude is Anthropic's family of AI assistants known for long context windows, nuanced reasoning and strong enterprise adoption.

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness — the four quality criteria Google (and now AI engines) use to evaluate pages.

A featured snippet is a highlighted answer block in Google that appears above the organic results, giving a direct summary pulled from a web page.

GEO is the discipline of making content visible and citeable in generative AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overview.

Google AI Mode is a fully conversational search interface from Google where users have a dialogue with an AI instead of clicking links.

Grounding is the technique where an AI model anchors its answer in verifiable external sources, so facts are checkable and hallucinations are prevented.

A knowledge graph is a structured network of entities and relationships that search engines and AI engines use to understand the world.

A Large Language Model is an AI model that understands and generates natural language based on statistical patterns learned from billions of text documents.

An LLM hallucination is when a language model confidently generates factually incorrect information as if it were true.

llms.txt is a conventional file in a website's root that gives AI engines a structured overview of which content is relevant to read.

Perplexity is an AI search engine that actively searches the web on every query and delivers answers with clear source citations.

Prompt engineering is the craft of formulating instructions to an AI model so it consistently produces the desired output.

RAG is a technique where an AI model actively retrieves external sources at answer time so responses are accurate and verifiable.

Schema markup is structured data (typically JSON-LD) that tells search engines and AI engines explicitly what a page is about.

Semantic SEO is the practice of optimising around concepts and entities rather than individual keywords, so search engines and AI engines understand the full meaning of a page.

A zero-click search is a query where the user gets their answer directly on the results page without clicking through to a website.