GEO Glossary

Answer Engine Optimization. The practice of formatting and structuring content so AI assistants and conversational search engines can read and cite it as an answer to someone’s question. In everyday use, AEO and GEO refer to the same work.

An AI platform can only name a page it has read, and AI crawlers are the programs that do the reading. The main ones are GPTBot for OpenAI, ClaudeBot for Anthropic, PerplexityBot for Perplexity, and Google-Extended for Gemini.

Google’s full conversational search, a separate destination where someone can ask follow-up questions instead of reading a single answer on the results page. Distinct from AI Overviews, which appears inline above the links.

Google’s AI-generated answer that appears above the standard blue links on many searches. It summarizes several sources and links to a handful of them. Sometimes abbreviated AIO.

When an AI platform names a specific website or brand in its answer to someone’s question. The closest equivalent to a first-page ranking on Google.

Whether a website or brand appears in the answers AI platforms give, and where.

AI Optimization. A broad term for optimizing content across every form of AI-driven discovery, used interchangeably with GEO, AEO, and LLMO (and sometimes written GAIO or AI SEO). Written as AIO it can also mean AI Overviews, Google’s answer panel, so context decides which is meant.

The evidence AI platforms weigh when assessing how credible a source is, such as reviews, credentials, and a consistent profile across the web.

Anthropic’s web crawler. It reads pages so Claude can draw on them when it answers.

The behind-the-scenes code of a page that platforms parse but visitors never see, such as meta tags, schema markup, and structured data. It carries the machine-readable facts, separate from the words and images on the page.

When different sources share a similar name or location, AI platforms can blur their records together. Entity disambiguation is the set of signals that keeps each record tied to the right one.

An AI system that generates a conversational answer from what someone asks. The major ones are ChatGPT (OpenAI), Gemini (Google), Claude (Anthropic), and Perplexity.

Generative Engine Optimization. The practice of improving a subject’s visibility in the conversational answers AI platforms generate, by shaping the content and wider online presence those platforms draw on.

The name a site uses in robots.txt to allow or block Gemini, separate from Googlebot, which handles traditional search.

OpenAI’s web crawler. It reads pages so ChatGPT can draw on them, and a site can allow or block it in robots.txt.

Tying an AI answer to real sources so its claims can be traced back to evidence. A grounded answer quotes or paraphrases the documents it retrieved, which reduces made-up information.

When an AI states something that sounds right but is wrong or unsupported by any source. Grounding an answer in retrieved documents is the main way platforms reduce it.

Short for JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data, the format most sites use to write structured data that AI platforms can parse. The standard choice for Schema.org markup.

A map of the people, places, and organizations in the world and how they connect, which AI platforms draw on to tell one source from another and link related facts.

The kind of AI that generates text by predicting likely words from patterns in the data it was trained on. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity are all built on large language models.

Large Language Model Optimization. The practice of structuring content so large language models can retrieve and cite it accurately. Often treated as the technical layer of GEO, and used interchangeably with it.

A file placed at the root of a site that tells AI platforms what the site is about and which pages matter most. Similar in idea to robots.txt, but written to guide AI rather than search crawlers.

Perplexity’s web crawler. It reads pages so Perplexity can cite them in its answers.

Appearing consistently across the major AI platforms (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude) rather than only one.

People ask AI platforms full questions in plain language rather than typing keywords. Query alignment shapes content around the way those questions are asked, so a platform can match it to the questions it answers.

The method behind most AI answers. A platform first retrieves relevant documents, then writes its answer from them rather than from memory alone, which is why fresh, well-structured content can be pulled in.

A long-standing file that tells web crawlers which pages they may access. For a site to appear in AI answers, this file has to allow the AI crawlers, such as GPTBot and ClaudeBot.

A shared vocabulary from Schema.org for labeling what something on a page is, so platforms can read it precisely. Common types include Organization, Person, Product, and Article.

Across a set of questions, how often AI answers name or cite one source rather than its competitors. Sometimes called citation share, it goes beyond whether a source appears to how much of the answer space it holds.

Machine-readable information written into a website’s code so AI platforms can parse what a page is about. Usually added as JSON-LD.