Glossary
AI search, in plain English.
The terms you’ll hear when talking about SEO, AEO and GEO — defined in a sentence or two.
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)
- Structuring content so search and answer engines can extract it directly as the answer — in featured snippets, People Also Ask, voice assistants and AI Overviews.
- AI Overviews
- Google’s AI-generated summaries shown above traditional search results, with links to the sources used.
- Citation (AI)
- A link or named source an AI assistant shows to support its answer. Being cited sends referral traffic and builds trust.
- Core Web Vitals
- Google’s user-experience metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (loading), Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness) and Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability).
- E-E-A-T
- Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness — the qualities Google’s quality raters use to judge content and its creators.
- Entity
- A uniquely identifiable thing — a business, person, place or concept — that search engines and LLMs can recognise and connect to facts.
- Featured snippet
- A highlighted answer box at the top of Google results that quotes a passage from a web page.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)
- Making a brand the source that generative AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot cite and recommend in their answers.
- GPTBot
- OpenAI’s web crawler used to gather training data. OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User are separate agents used for ChatGPT search and live browsing.
- Knowledge Graph
- Google’s database of entities and their relationships, which powers knowledge panels and helps AI systems verify facts.
- llms.txt
- A proposed Markdown file at a site’s root that gives large language models a concise, curated overview of the site’s most important content.
- NAP consistency
- Keeping a business’s Name, Address and Phone number identical across its website, Google Business Profile and directories.
- People Also Ask (PAA)
- An expandable list of related questions with short answers shown in Google results.
- Prompt tracking
- Regularly running a fixed set of buyer questions through AI assistants and logging whether, how and how accurately a brand appears.
- Schema markup
- Structured data, usually JSON-LD using the schema.org vocabulary, that tells machines exactly what a page and its subject are.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
- Improving a website so it ranks higher in search engines like Google and Bing for relevant queries.
- Zero-click search
- A search that ends on the results page — answered by a snippet, AI Overview or panel — without the user clicking any result.
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