GEO and AEO glossary: 60 terms in plain English

GEO (generative engine optimization) and AEO (answer engine optimization) both mean the same broad thing: making your business easy for AI assistants and AI search features to find, understand and cite. The vocabulary is the hard part: product names change, crawler names look alike, and terms get used loosely in sales pitches.

This glossary defines 60 terms in one or two sentences each. Where a term is a product feature, a crawler or a setting, the definition follows the vendor's own documentation as of October 2026. Where the vendor hasn't published how something works, the entry says so.

A to C

AEO (answer engine optimization)

The practice of structuring your content and authority signals so search engines and AI answer engines present your business as the direct answer to a question.

AI Assistant channel

A channel in Google Analytics 4's default channel group for visits that arrive from sources like ChatGPT, Gemini, Deepseek, Copilot or Grok. It excludes Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. Our guide to tracking AI traffic in GA4 shows how to build a custom channel for the same visits.

AI Mode

Google's conversational AI search experience. You ask a question, get an AI-generated response with links to the web, and can ask follow-up questions. It opened to US users without a Labs sign-up on May 20, 2025. See Google AI Mode explained.

AI Overviews

Google's "AI-generated snapshot with key information and links to dig deeper," shown in search results when Google's systems decide generative AI would help. Google's documentation notes that AI Overviews often don't trigger.

AI Performance report

A Bing Webmaster Tools report, in public preview since February 2026, that shows how often your content is cited across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and select partner AI integrations. It counts citations, not clicks or traffic. Setup is covered in Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow for AI search.

AI visibility

An informal umbrella term for how often, and how accurately, AI answers mention, describe or cite your brand. There is no standard way to measure it.

Brand mention

A reference to your brand on another website or in an AI answer, with or without a link. Google's guidance says that seeking inauthentic mentions across the web "isn't as helpful as it might seem."

ChatGPT search

The web search feature inside ChatGPT. ChatGPT may search automatically when a question would benefit from current information, and responses that use search may include citations. As of October 2026, OpenAI lists it on its free and paid plans and for people who aren't signed in.

ChatGPT-User

The OpenAI agent that visits a page when a user's question prompts ChatGPT to fetch it. It is not used for automatic crawling, and OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply because the user started the action.

Citation

In AI search, a link or source reference shown with an answer. In local SEO the same word means something else: a listing of your business name, address and phone number on a directory, explained in what citations are in local SEO.

Citation Share

A Bing AI Performance metric, in preview since June 2026: the percentage of citations attributed to your site out of all citations shown across all sites for the same grounding query. It does not reveal competitor domains or represent traffic share.

Claude-SearchBot

Anthropic's search crawler, which "navigates the web to improve search result quality for users." Anthropic says blocking it may reduce your site's visibility and accuracy in user search results.

ClaudeBot

Anthropic's crawler for collecting web content that could contribute to model training. Blocking it signals that your site's future materials should be excluded from Anthropic's training datasets.

Crawler

An automated program that fetches web pages, also called a bot. AI companies run different crawlers for training, for search and for user-triggered fetches, each with its own name. The full list is in AI crawlers and robots.txt.

D to F

data-nosnippet

An HTML attribute you can put on span, div and section elements to keep that part of a page out of Google's snippets. It is one of the preview controls Google lists for limiting what its AI features show from your pages.

Doorway page

A page created to rank for specific, similar queries that leads people to an intermediate page less useful than the final destination. Google treats this as spam; pages targeted at specific cities that funnel visitors to one page are a listed example.

E-E-A-T

Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: the qualities Google says its ranking systems try to identify in content. Google says E-E-A-T is not itself a specific ranking factor and that trust matters most. Our article on YMYL and E-E-A-T applies it to mental health websites.

Entity

A distinct, identifiable thing, such as a business, person, product or place. Much GEO work is making sure your business is described the same way everywhere. See what entities are.

FAQ rich result

Featured snippet

A classic Google Search feature that Google describes as "special boxes where the format of a regular search result is reversed," with the descriptive text shown first. It is separate from AI Overviews.

G to I

Generative AI performance report

A Search Console report showing impressions of links to your site inside AI Overviews and AI Mode, available to all websites since August 31, 2026. Google's help page describes impressions by page, country, date and device; it does not describe clicks or queries.

GEO (generative engine optimization)

The practice of positioning your brand to be surfaced, quoted and cited inside generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot. Google's position is that, for Google Search, this is "still SEO." We compare the labels in GEO vs AEO vs SEO.

Google Business Profile

Google's listing for a business that either has a location customers can visit or travels to customers. Google says keeping Business Profile information up to date can help your services be visible in AI responses as well as other search results.

Google-Extended

A robots.txt control token, not a crawler. It tells Google whether content it crawls may be used to train future Gemini models and for grounding in Gemini Apps and Vertex AI. It does not affect inclusion or ranking in Google Search, and it does not remove you from AI Overviews or AI Mode.

Googlebot

Google's Search crawler. Because AI is built into Search, robots.txt rules for Googlebot are also the control for how your site is crawled for AI Overviews and AI Mode.

GPTBot

OpenAI's training crawler. Disallowing it indicates your content should not be used to train OpenAI's generative AI foundation models. It is independent of OAI-SearchBot, according to OpenAI's crawler documentation.

Grounding

Giving an AI model retrieved content at the moment it answers, so the answer rests on sources instead of memory alone. Google defines it as "providing content from the Google Search index to the model at prompt time to improve factuality and relevancy."

Grounding queries

In Bing's AI Performance report, "the key phrases the AI used when retrieving content that was referenced in AI-generated answers." They are not the full questions people typed, and Microsoft says the data is a sample.

Hallucination

An AI answer that states something false or unsupported as if it were fact. No step prevents it entirely.

Indexing

A search engine storing a page so it can be shown in results. To be a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet.

IndexNow

An open protocol for telling participating search engines the moment a URL is added, updated or deleted. As of October 2026 the IndexNow participant list includes Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam, Yep and Amazon. Google is not on it, and a submission does not guarantee indexing.

J to L

JSON-LD

A format for writing structured data as a block of code in a page, separate from the visible text. Google recommends it for structured data when your site's setup allows.

Knowledge Panel

An information box Google shows when you search for an entity that is in its Knowledge Graph. Panels are generated automatically, and only some can be claimed. See Wikidata and Wikipedia for GEO.

Large language model (LLM)

An AI model trained on large amounts of text to generate language. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are built on LLMs.

llms.txt

A proposal, first published in September 2024 and updated to version 2 in August 2026, for a Markdown file that helps AI agents use a website. It is not a ratified standard. Google says Google Search ignores it. The verdict is in what is llms.txt.

LocalBusiness structured data

Schema.org markup that tells Google about a local business, including its hours and departments. Google requires the name and address properties for rich result eligibility. No vendor states that it increases AI citations.

M to O

max-snippet

A robots meta rule that caps how much text Google may show from a page as a snippet. Google says it also limits how much of the content may be used as a direct input for AI Overviews and AI Mode.

NOARCHIVE and NOCACHE

Two Bing directives. NOARCHIVE prevents content from being used in Copilot responses and grounding results. NOCACHE limits Copilot to using only the URL, title and snippet, which Bing says reduces citation depth and answer quality.

noindex

A rule telling search engines not to show a page in results at all. Google names it as the way to block content from Google Search completely, and Bing says to use it when a URL should not appear in Bing search or Copilot.

nosnippet

A robots meta rule that stops Google from showing a text snippet for a page. Google says it also prevents the content from being used as a direct input for AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Notability

Wikipedia's test for whether a subject can have an article. A company is presumed notable if it has significant coverage in multiple reliable secondary sources that are independent of it. Press releases and sponsored articles don't count.

OAI-SearchBot

OpenAI's search crawler, used to surface websites in ChatGPT's search features. Sites that opt out of it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links.

Organization structured data

Schema.org markup, usually on the home page, that helps Google understand your organization's administrative details and tell it apart from others. Google lists no required properties for it.

P to R

Perplexity-User

Perplexity's user-triggered fetcher, which may visit a page to help answer a user's question. Because a user requested the fetch, Perplexity says it generally ignores robots.txt rules.

PerplexityBot

Perplexity's search crawler, designed to surface and link websites in Perplexity's search results. Perplexity states that it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models.

Prompt

The question or instruction a person gives an AI assistant. AI visibility tools track a set of prompts you choose and monitor the answers they produce.

Query fan-out

Google's term for a "set of concurrent, related queries generated by the model to request more information and fetch additional relevant search results to address the user's query." Both AI Overviews and AI Mode may use it. See query fan-out explained.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)

A technique, which Google also calls grounding, for improving the quality, accuracy and freshness of AI responses by retrieving relevant, up-to-date pages from a search index before the model answers.

Rich result

A Google search result enhanced beyond a plain link, such as a review snippet or product details, made possible by structured data. Several types have been retired, including How-to in 2023 and FAQ in 2026.

robots.txt

A text file at the root of your site that tells crawlers what they may fetch. It is the main control AI vendors document for their crawlers, though several say their user-triggered fetchers may not follow it.

S to Z

sameAs

A schema.org property holding the "URL of a reference Web page that unambiguously indicates the item's identity," such as a Wikipedia page, a Wikidata entry or an official website. No vendor states that it improves AI citations or creates a Knowledge Panel.

Scaled content abuse

A Google spam policy covering pages produced in bulk without adding value, including with generative AI tools. Google says creating separate content for every query variation or fan-out query, primarily to manipulate rankings or AI responses, violates it.

Search generative AI control

A Search Console setting at Settings > Search generative AI that includes or excludes your site's links and content from AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover. Inclusion is the default, and the control doesn't affect AI training.

Service-area business

Google's term for a business that visits or delivers to customers directly but doesn't serve them at its own address, such as a plumber or cleaning service. Google says it should remove its address from its Business Profile and list the areas it serves.

SGE (Search Generative Experience)

Google's May 2023 Search Labs experiment with AI-generated answers. It became AI Overviews when Google launched the feature to everyone in the US in May 2024.

Structured data

What Google calls "a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content," usually written with schema.org vocabulary. Google says it isn't required for generative AI search but is still worth using for rich results, and it must match the visible text.

Training crawl

Crawling done to collect content for training AI models, as opposed to crawling for search. OpenAI and Anthropic use separate crawlers for each, so you can block training and stay eligible for their search features.

User-triggered fetcher

An agent that requests a specific page because a person asked an assistant something, such as ChatGPT-User or Perplexity-User. Vendors treat these differently from crawlers, and several say they may not follow robots.txt.

Wikidata

A Wikimedia project that stores structured facts about entities as "items." It has its own notability criteria, and no AI vendor has stated that a Wikidata item affects its answers.

Zero-click search

A search that ends without a click to any website because the results page itself answered the question. AI answers are one reason it happens. See zero-click searches explained.

Conclusion

You need enough of these terms to tell a documented fact from a sales claim. When a proposal uses a term that isn't here, ask the vendor to point to the platform's own documentation for it. If you'd like to see where your site stands today, request a free GEO audit. More guides are in our GEO and AEO Guide.

What is the difference between GEO and AEO?

In practice, very little. AEO is the older label and leans toward direct answers, featured snippets and voice results. GEO is the newer label and leans toward generative assistants such as ChatGPT and Perplexity. Most of the work is the same, and both build on ordinary SEO.

Is GEO just SEO with a new name?

For Google, largely yes. Google says optimizing for generative AI search is "still SEO" and that its AI features have no extra requirements. Other assistants run their own crawlers and publish less about how they choose sources.

What is the difference between GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot?

GPTBot crawls content that may be used to train OpenAI's models. OAI-SearchBot crawls so sites can be surfaced in ChatGPT's search features. OpenAI says each robots.txt setting is independent, so you can block one and allow the other.

Does blocking Google-Extended remove my site from AI Overviews?

No. Google-Extended covers Gemini model training and grounding in Gemini Apps and Vertex AI. AI Overviews and AI Mode are governed by Googlebot rules, preview controls such as nosnippet, and the Search generative AI control in Search Console.