Glossary

The vocabulary of AI search.

This field has collected an unusual number of names for the same handful of ideas. These are the definitions we use, written to be read rather than to sound impressive.

AI Crawler: An AI crawler is an automated agent operated by an AI company that fetches web pages either to train models or to support live search within an assistant.
AI Overviews: AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of Google Search results, assembled from pages in Google's ordinary Search index.
AI Share of Voice: AI share of voice is the proportion of tracked prompts in which a business is mentioned, relative to its competitors, across AI engines.
Answer Engine: An answer engine is a system that responds to a query with a direct synthesised answer rather than a list of links to sources.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO): Answer engine optimization is the practice of making a business legible and credible enough that AI systems name it inside a generated answer.
Brand Mention: A brand mention in AI search is any occurrence of a business's name inside a generated answer, whether or not the answer links to that business's website.
Citation: In AI search, a citation is a link an answer engine shows to the source page it used when generating part of its answer.
E-E-A-T: E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness — the framework Google's quality raters use to assess content and its creators.
Entity: An entity is a distinct thing — a company, person, product or place — that a search or AI system recognises and reasons about as a single identifiable object.
FAQ Schema: FAQ schema is structured data marking up question-and-answer pairs on a page so machines can identify each question and its corresponding answer precisely.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): Generative engine optimization is optimising content so that generative AI systems surface and cite it in their responses; in practice it describes the same work as answer engine optimization.
Google-Extended: Google-Extended is a robots.txt token that controls whether a site's content may be used to train Google's Gemini models, without affecting Google Search indexing.
GPTBot: GPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler used to collect training data; it is distinct from the agents that power search results shown inside ChatGPT.
Grounding: Grounding is the practice of tying an AI system's answer to specific retrieved sources so its claims can be traced and verified.
Hallucination: A hallucination is a confident, fluent statement produced by an AI system that is factually wrong or unsupported by any source.
Knowledge Graph: A knowledge graph is a structured database of entities and the relationships between them, used by search and AI systems to reason about the world rather than just match text.
LLM SEO: LLM SEO is a colloquial term for optimising a website so that large language models mention and cite it — another name for answer engine optimization.
llms.txt: llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file at the root of a website that summarises what the site is and points to its most important pages for AI systems.
Prompt Tracking: Prompt tracking is the practice of repeatedly asking a fixed set of buyer questions across AI engines and recording whether and how a business is mentioned each time.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): Retrieval-augmented generation is a technique where an AI system searches for relevant documents at query time and uses their contents to generate its answer, rather than relying only on training data.
sameAs: sameAs is a schema.org property listing authoritative URLs that refer to the same entity — typically social, directory and professional profiles.
Schema.org: Schema.org is a shared vocabulary of types and properties, maintained collaboratively by major search engines, used to describe the meaning of web content in a machine-readable way.
Server-Side Rendering (SSR): Server-side rendering is generating a page's HTML on the server so its content is present in the initial response, before any JavaScript runs in the browser.
Structured Data: Structured data is machine-readable markup embedded in a page that states explicitly what its content means, most commonly using schema.org vocabulary in JSON-LD format.
Zero-Click Search: A zero-click search is a query answered fully on the results page or inside an assistant, so the user never visits any website.

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