AEO & AI Search Glossary
Master the language of Answer Engine Optimization and AI search, your guide to AEO, GEO, and the future of search visibility.
A
AI Agent
An AI agent is a model wired up to take actions on its own: read a brief, call tools, work through steps, and return a result without step-by-step prompting.
AI Citations
AI citations are the source links AI models attach to their answers. They show where a fact came from and decide which brands get credit.
AI Crawlers
AI crawlers are bots run by AI vendors. Some fetch pages to train models, others fetch pages live to power answers inside AI search products.
AI Hallucination
An AI hallucination is when a model states something false with full confidence. It happens when the model fills gaps with plausible-sounding text instead of grounded facts.
AI Search Engine
AI search engines synthesise an answer instead of returning a list of links. ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are the most-used examples.
AI Share of Voice (AI SOV)
AI Share of Voice measures how often a brand shows up in AI-generated answers compared to its competitors, across a defined set of category prompts.
AI Training Cutoff
The training cutoff is the date after which a model has no knowledge baked in. Anything newer has to come from live retrieval or tools.
Answer Accuracy
Answer accuracy is how often an AI model gives a correct, well-grounded response when asked a question of fact.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Answer Engine Optimization is the work of becoming the cited source inside AI answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity, not just a blue link on Google.
Anthropic Claude
Claude is Anthropic's family of large language models. It is known for long-form reasoning, a careful tone, and the Constitutional AI training approach.
Attention Mechanism
Attention is the part of a transformer that decides which words in the input matter most when the model generates each new word.
B
Brand SERP
A brand SERP is the page Google returns when someone searches your brand name. It is the most consequential page in a company's search footprint.
Brand Visibility
Brand visibility is how easily a buyer can find, recognise, and recall a brand across the surfaces they actually use. AI search is now one of those surfaces.
C
ChatGPT Search
ChatGPT Search is OpenAI's web-connected mode inside ChatGPT. It returns conversational answers grounded in live web results, with inline citations.
Citation Ranking
Citation ranking is the order in which an AI model lists its sources. Higher rank means more credit, more visibility, and usually more clicks.
Content Chunking
Content chunking splits a document into smaller, semantically coherent pieces so retrieval systems and AI models can index, search, and cite them cleanly.
Context Window
The context window is the maximum number of tokens an AI model can read and reason over in a single request.
Conversational Search
Conversational search is search done as a back-and-forth dialogue with an AI engine instead of a single keyword query.
E
E-E-A-T
E-E-A-T is Google's framework for judging quality: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. The same signals carry weight in AI search.
Entity Recognition
Entity recognition is how AI systems pick out people, brands, products, and places in a piece of text and link them to a known identity.
F
Featured Snippet
A featured snippet is the short answer Google promotes to the top of the results, lifted from a ranking page as a paragraph, list, or table.
Fine-Tuning
Fine-tuning takes a pre-trained model and continues training it on a narrower dataset so it performs better on a specific task or domain.
G
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
Generative Engine Optimization is the work of shaping how generative AI platforms describe, recommend, and cite your brand when they answer a buyer's question.
Google AI Overviews (AIO)
Google AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that sit above the blue links, stitched together from multiple sources directly inside Google Search.
Google Gemini
Google Gemini is the multimodal model family from Google DeepMind. It powers AI Overviews, the Gemini assistant, and most generative features across Google's products.
Grounding
Grounding is the practice of tying an AI model's answer to verifiable source material instead of letting it generate from memory alone.
L
Large Language Model (LLM)
A large language model is an AI trained on huge amounts of text to predict the next token, which is enough to make it read, write, and reason in plain language.
llms.txt
llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file at the root of a site. It gives large language models a curated, machine-readable map of the pages that matter most.
M
Microsoft Copilot
Microsoft Copilot is the umbrella for Microsoft's AI assistants: the consumer chat experience on GPT and Bing, and the 365 Copilot embedded across Office.
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
Model Context Protocol is an open standard from Anthropic that gives AI models a consistent way to call tools, fetch data, and act on external systems.
Model Temperature
Model temperature is the dial that controls how random an AI model's output is. Low for predictable, high for creative.
Multimodal AI
Multimodal AI handles more than text. The same model can read images, audio, video, and code in a single request.
P
People Also Ask (PAA)
People Also Ask is the Google SERP feature that shows expandable related questions and loads more as users interact with it.
Perplexity AI
Perplexity AI is a citation-first answer engine. Every query pulls live web sources, and the synthesised answer carries inline references back to them.
Pillar Page
A pillar page introduces a broad topic and links out to a cluster of supporting articles, each covering a subtopic in depth.
Prompt Engineering
Prompt engineering is the craft of writing instructions that steer an AI model toward the answer you actually want.
S
Schema Markup
Schema markup is structured code added to a page using the Schema.org vocabulary. It describes the content in a way search engines and AI systems can parse reliably.
Search Intent
Search intent is the actual goal behind a query. Same words, different intent, completely different answer.
Semantic Search
Semantic search reads queries for meaning instead of matching keywords. It is the foundation for how AI models find relevant content.
Source Attribution
Source attribution is the practice of an AI system naming and linking the sources it used to generate an answer.
Structured Data
Structured data is information marked up in a defined format so machines can read it without guessing. On the web, that usually means Schema.org JSON-LD.
Synthetic Data
Synthetic data is data generated by an algorithm instead of collected from the real world. AI teams use it to train, test, and stress models.
Synthetic Media
Synthetic media is image, video, audio, or text generated by AI rather than captured or written by a person.
T
Token
A token is the smallest piece of text an AI model reads at a time. Sometimes a word, often a fragment of one.
Token Limit
A token limit is the maximum number of tokens a model can read in a single request, prompt plus response combined.
Topical Authority
Topical authority is the expertise a site appears to have on a subject, built from depth of content, tight internal linking, and recognition from other credible sources.
Training Data
Training data is the text, images, and other content used to teach an AI model what to do. The quality of that data sets the ceiling on the model's accuracy.
