GEO glossary: the terms of visibility in AI answers

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)A practical synonym of GEO that stresses the direct answers of engines, with or without generative AI.
AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot)The bots with which model providers read the web, for training or for real-time search. They must be recognised and allowed.
AI Mode (Google)The conversational mode of Google Search, in which the whole results page is a generated answer.
AI Overviews (Google)The AI-generated summary Google shows above the results, present on almost half of tracked searches.
Anti-bot (and anti-AI) protectionThe hosting and CDN rules that block automated traffic, often including AI crawlers without the owner knowing.
Bing as the index of ChatGPT and CopilotWhen ChatGPT browses, it searches on Bing; Copilot is built on the Bing index. Being indexed on Bing is a condition for being cited.
Branded questions (prompts with the name)The questions that contain the name of the company or its leaders: they measure the accuracy, freshness and tone of what AI knows about you.
Category questions (unbranded prompts)The questions that do not contain the company's name but should make it appear: "which X suppliers", "where to apply in industry Y".
Citation (in AI answers)The explicit reference to a source, with a link or attribution, in a generative answer.
Dated narrativeA true but superseded fact (a crisis, a lawsuit, a restructuring) that AI tells in the present tense because no more recent source has updated it.
E-E-A-TExperience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: the criteria with which Google evaluates sources, echoed in different forms by generative models.
EntityA company, person or product as an object identifiable by machines, with a name, identifiers and relationships.
FAQPage and extractable blocksQuestions and answers declared in structured data and written to be picked up verbatim by a model.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)The set of activities that make a company present, correctly cited and recommended in the answers of generative engines.
GEO ScoreThe A-to-F score (0-100) that summarises a company's presence, accuracy and sentiment in AI answers, comparable over time and with competitors.
Grounding and RAGThe techniques by which a model anchors its answer to documents retrieved at the time, rather than to memory alone.
Hallucination (AI)A plausible but false statement produced by a model, often to fill the absence of sources about an entity.
IndexNowThe protocol with which a website instantly notifies Bing and participating engines of new or changed pages.
Knowledge GraphThe base of entities and relationships with which Google (and, in different forms, the other engines) identifies companies, people and products.
LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization)Another name for GEO, with the emphasis on language models and their training memory.
llms.txtA text file proposed in 2024 to offer models a Markdown map of the website. Useful at zero cost, but rarely read by crawlers.
Mention (in AI answers)The presence of a company's name in a generative answer, not necessarily with a link to the source.
Monitoring (of AI answers)The periodic run, with the same set of questions, of what AI says about a company, with alerts on negative narratives and before/after reports.
Re-analysis (at 90 days)Repeating the assessment with the same set of questions, on the same engines, to measure what has moved after the interventions.
Recommendation (in AI answers)A company being proposed as an option in a choice question: which supplier, where to apply, whom to invest in.
sameAs (schema.org)The structured-data property with which a website declares the official profiles and entries of its entity.
Sentiment (in AI answers)The tone with which a model describes a company: positive, neutral, mixed or negative, and the facts behind it.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)Optimising a website to appear among the results of traditional search engines. It remains the technical base of GEO.
Share of voice in AI answersThe share of category answers in which a company appears, compared with the competitors cited next to it or in its place.
Source (of an AI answer)The page, document or data item from which a model took a statement. The point where GEO acts.
Source mapThe verified list of the pages that shape a company's perception in AI answers, ordered by weight, with URL and date.
Structured data (schema.org)The vocabulary with which a page tells machines what it contains: organisation, person, service, article, FAQ.
Training memory and browsingThe two ways a model knows a company: what it read when it was built, and what it finds on the web at the time of the question.
WikidataWikimedia's free, structured knowledge base, read by all models and at the base of the Knowledge Graph.
Zero-click searchA search that ends without any click on a result, because the answer is already on the page. About 60% of searches in 2025-2026.

Glossary of Generative Engine Optimization

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