Reference

GEO Glossary

The vocabulary of getting cited by AI, defined in plain language. Bookmark it — these are the terms every GEO and AEO conversation in 2026 runs on.

By Kloovy · Updated June 18, 2026 · 7 min read

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)

Optimizing content to be cited as the direct answer in AI-generated responses, rather than to rank in a list of search results. AEO rewards quotable answer blocks, schema, and clear factual claims, and is built on the same foundation as SEO.

AI citation

A mention or attribution of a brand, page, or fact inside an answer generated by an AI engine such as ChatGPT or Perplexity. Winning AI citations is the central goal of GEO and AEO — the citation, not the click, is the moment of discovery.

AI crawler

An automated bot that AI companies use to fetch web content for training or answering. Common AI crawlers include GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI), PerplexityBot (Perplexity), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), and Google-Extended (Google). If robots.txt blocks them, the engine cannot cite you.

AI Overviews

Google's AI-generated answer that appears above traditional search results, summarizing the topic and citing sources. Appearing in AI Overviews is a key GEO outcome; FAQ-schema pages are about 3.2× more likely to be featured in them.

AI Visibility Score

A single measure of how often and how prominently a brand is cited across AI answer engines, combining citation frequency, prominence, share of voice, accuracy, and coverage. See what an AI Visibility Score is for the full breakdown.

Answer block

A concise 40–60 word passage near the top of a page that answers its core question in quotable, declarative prose, placed directly under the H1. Because roughly 44% of AI citations come from the first ~30% of a page, the answer block is the single highest-leverage element for citability.

Answer engine

A system that responds to a query with a synthesized answer rather than a list of links — for example ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews. The shift from search engines to answer engines is what makes GEO necessary.

Citation share (share of voice)

How often a brand is cited in AI answers relative to its competitors for the same set of questions. Citation share turns raw citation counts into a competitive metric: it tells you not just whether you appear, but whether you're winning.

Entity recognition

How accurately and consistently AI systems understand what a brand is, what category it belongs to, and how it relates to other entities. Strong entity recognition comes from describing your brand the same way across the web, and it underpins both accurate citations and favorable representation.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

The umbrella practice of improving how a brand is represented across all generative AI surfaces — being cited, described accurately, and recognized as an entity. GEO contains AEO and shares its technical foundation with SEO.

Hallucination

When an AI engine states something false — for instance describing a brand's product, pricing, or category incorrectly. Hallucinations about your brand are a GEO problem: the fix is clearer, more consistent, machine-readable facts that the engine can ground its answer in.

llms.txt

A plain-text file at a site's root that maps key pages for AI crawlers, helping them find and prioritize the most important content. It complements robots.txt: where robots.txt grants access, llms.txt provides a guided table of contents.

Passage-level citability

How easily a single passage can be lifted from a page and quoted on its own while still making sense out of context. AI engines extract passages, not whole pages, so writing self-contained, declarative paragraphs raises citability directly.

robots.txt

A file at a site's root that tells crawlers which paths they may access. For AI visibility it must explicitly allow the AI crawlers you want citing you — a blocked crawler means zero citations from that engine, no matter how good the content is.

Schema (structured data)

Machine-readable markup, usually JSON-LD, that describes a page's content to engines using Schema.org vocabularies such as Article and FAQPage. Schema lowers parsing uncertainty and, in the case of FAQ schema, materially raises the odds of appearing in AI Overviews.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Optimizing content to rank in traditional search results through crawlability, keywords, backlinks, and authority. SEO is the foundation beneath AEO and GEO — the same clean structure that ranks a page also makes it citable.

Zero-click search

A search that ends without the user clicking through to a website, because the answer is shown directly on the results page. With zero-click searches near 60%, the value of being the cited source — rather than the clicked link — keeps rising.

Frequently asked questions