The vocabulary of AI search,
without the jargon tax.
16terms you'll hear from us, your competitors, and the AI engines themselves. Plain-language definitions, no fluff.
AEO
Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of structuring content so a question-answering engine surfaces it as the direct answer. It is closely related to GEO and focuses on the question-and-answer format.
Read more →AI crawlers
AI crawlers are the user-agents that pull content for AI training or live retrieval. The major ones include GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, anthropic-ai, and CCBot.
Read more →AI visibility score
An AI visibility score is a single number summarizing your AI visibility, typically blending citation share, sentiment, query coverage, and platform breadth. It is a useful north star but inherently lossy.
Read more →Citation share
Citation share is the percentage of AI answers in a topic where your brand is cited as a source, measured against the total brand citations across all competitors. It is the closest analogue to search rank for generative engines.
Read more →Entity (SEO sense)
An entity is a real-world thing, such as a company, a product, or a person, that search engines and language models recognize as distinct from a mere string of letters. Becoming a strong entity is the biggest unlock for consistent AI citations.
Read more →FAQ schema
FAQ schema is JSON-LD that marks up question-and-answer pairs on a page so search and AI engines can lift them as direct answers. It is one of the highest-ROI schema types for answer engines.
Read more →GEO
Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of getting your brand cited inside AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and similar engines. It is the AI-era successor to ranking on Google.
Read more →IndexNow
IndexNow is an open protocol that lets you ping search engines the moment you publish or update a page, instead of waiting to be re-crawled. It speeds up how fast your changes are noticed.
Read more →JSON-LD
JSON-LD is the recommended format for embedding structured data in a webpage: a small JSON block inside a script tag. It is the format Google, Bing, and AI crawlers all prefer.
Read more →Knowledge Graph
A knowledge graph is a structured database of entities and their relationships, maintained by Google, Bing, and increasingly by AI providers. Engines reach into it for facts before they write an answer.
Read more →LLMO
LLM Optimization is the broad practice of making content readable, indexable, and citable by large language models. It is the umbrella term that contains GEO and AEO.
Read more →llms.txt
llms.txt is an emerging convention: a plain-text file at /llms.txt that tells AI crawlers which parts of your site are worth reading. Think of it as robots.txt inverted, guiding engines toward your best content rather than away.
Read more →RAG
Retrieval-Augmented Generation is the pattern of pulling relevant documents from a search index and feeding them into a language model at answer time. It is what powers most cited AI answers.
Read more →robots.txt
robots.txt is the traditional crawler-control file that tells search engines and AI crawlers which paths they may fetch. In the AI era it quietly decides whether you can be cited at all.
Read more →Share of voice (AI)
Share of voice in AI is your slice of the conversation: across a basket of queries, how often AI cites you versus your competitors. Unlike raw citation share, it usually weights queries by importance.
Read more →Structured data
Structured data is machine-readable annotation, usually JSON-LD, that describes what a page is about: a product, an article, an FAQ, an organization. It is invisible to readers but heavily used by search and AI engines.
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