AI search glossary

Answer engine optimization. Shaping your pages so AI assistants and answer features can lift a clear, direct answer from them.

Google's conversational search mode, where you ask follow-up questions and get a written answer with links. It draws on Google's index.

AI-written summaries that appear at the top of some Google results, with links to the pages they draw on. Google says normal SEO best practice is what makes a page eligible.

How often, and how accurately, your brand is named or cited when people ask AI engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI features about your category.

A link or named source shown with an AI answer. Being cited means the engine used your page and pointed the reader to it.

The share of prompts in a prompt set where your site is cited. It shows whether your visibility is growing over time.

Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. A framework from Google's quality rater guidelines for judging whether content is credible.

A distinct thing that search engines and AI models recognise, such as a brand, product or person. Clear, consistent facts about your brand help engines treat it as one entity.

Generative engine optimization. Work aimed at getting your brand included and cited in answers written by generative AI engines.

A robots.txt token that lets you control whether Google uses your content for its Gemini models. It is not a separate crawler, and Google says it does not affect your inclusion in Google Search.

OpenAI's crawler for collecting training data. It is separate from OAI-SearchBot, which finds pages for ChatGPT search.

A broad name for making your brand and pages easier for large language models to find, understand and cite. It overlaps heavily with AEO and GEO.

A proposed convention for a plain-text file at your site's root that summarises your key pages for language models. It is not an agreed standard, and major engines have not confirmed they use it.

The crawler ChatGPT search uses to find pages it can show and cite. Blocking it in robots.txt can keep your pages out of ChatGPT search answers.

Perplexity's crawler. Perplexity searches the web live for each question and shows numbered sources alongside its answer.

A fixed list of questions your buyers are likely to ask AI engines. Running the same set each week makes changes in visibility comparable.

Google's name for how AI Mode splits one question into many related searches before writing its answer. Pages covering those related questions have more chances to be used.

Google's free tool showing how your site appears in Google Search: impressions, clicks, average position and indexing problems.

How often your brand appears in answers compared with your competitors across the same prompt set.

Code on a page, usually in schema.org format, that labels facts such as products, prices, reviews and FAQs so machines can read them. Google says no special markup is needed for its AI features.