Glossary
AEO glossary
30 terms you will meet in answer engine optimization, each with a one-line definition, what it means in practice, and the sources behind it.
A
- AI Mode
- AI Mode is Google's AI search experience for complex, multi-part questions, answering with a generated response and links to supporting websites.
- AI Overviews
- AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that Google shows in some search results, with links to the web pages that support the answer.
- AI share of voice
- AI share of voice is a vendor-defined metric comparing how often your brand appears in AI-generated answers with how often competitors appear, across a set of prompts.
- Answer engine
- Answer engines are search products that read web pages for the user and write a direct response, with links to the sources they drew on.
- Answer engine optimization
- AEO is the practice of making your content easy for AI answer engines to find, understand and cite when they write a response to a question.
B
- Brand mention
- A brand mention is your brand named in the text of an AI-generated answer, whether or not the answer links to your website.
C
- Citation
- Citations are links an AI answer attaches to a specific source page, showing which page supports each part of the response.
- ClaudeBot
- ClaudeBot is Anthropic's crawler that collects web content for training its generative AI models; blocking it in robots.txt excludes your future content from that training.
- Crawl budget
- Crawl budget is, in Google's definition, the set of URLs that Google can and wants to crawl on a site, set by its crawl capacity limit and crawl demand.
E
- E-E-A-T
- E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: the qualities Google's systems and search quality raters look for in reliable, helpful content.
- Entity
- An entity is a real-world thing, such as a person, place, organization or product, that search systems recognize as distinct, rather than as a string of words.
G
- Generative engine optimization
- GEO is the practice of improving how visible your content is inside the answers that generative AI search engines write, a term introduced in a 2023 research paper.
- Google-Extended
- Google-Extended is a robots.txt product token, not a separate crawler, that controls whether content Google crawls may be used to train future Gemini models and for grounding.
- GPTBot
- GPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler for model training: disallowing it in robots.txt tells OpenAI your content should not be used to train its generative AI foundation models.
- Grounding
- Grounding is connecting an AI model's answer to retrieved sources, such as live search results, so its claims can be traced back to specific pages.
I
- IndexNow
- IndexNow is a protocol for notifying participating search engines that URLs on your site changed, verified by a key file you host, so they can be crawled sooner.
J
- JSON-LD
- JSON-LD is a lightweight Linked Data format based on JSON, and the structured data format Google recommends for describing a page's content to search engines.
K
- Knowledge Graph
- The Knowledge Graph is Google's database of billions of facts about people, places and things, which powers features such as knowledge panels in Google Search.
L
- LLM optimization
- LLMO is a vendor term for optimizing your content and website so large language model tools mention and cite you more often in their answers.
- llms.txt
- llms.txt is a proposed markdown file, suggested by Jeremy Howard, that gives AI agents a short, curated guide to a site's most useful content.
O
- OAI-SearchBot
- OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's crawler for ChatGPT's search features; sites that disallow it in robots.txt are not shown in ChatGPT search answers.
P
- Passage ranking
- Passage ranking is Google's AI system for judging individual sections, or passages, of a web page to understand how relevant the page is to a search.
- PerplexityBot
- PerplexityBot is Perplexity's crawler for surfacing and linking websites in Perplexity's search results; Perplexity says it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models.
Q
- Query fan-out
- Query fan-out is a technique where an AI search system splits one question into several related searches across subtopics, then combines the results into one answer.
R
- Retrieval-augmented generation
- RAG is a method where an AI system first retrieves relevant passages from an index, then generates its answer using those passages as context.
- robots.txt
- robots.txt is a plain-text file at the root of a site that tells crawlers, by user-agent token, which URLs they may fetch, as standardized in RFC 9309.
S
- sameAs
- sameAs is a schema.org property holding the URL of a reference web page that unambiguously indicates an item's identity, such as your brand's official profiles elsewhere.
- Structured data
- Structured data is machine-readable code on a page, usually schema.org vocabulary in JSON-LD, that labels what the page is about for search engines.
U
- User agent
- A user agent is the name a crawler or browser identifies itself by: a full string in the HTTP User-Agent header, and a shorter product token used in robots.txt.
Z
- Zero-click search
- Zero-click search is a search that ends without the user clicking on any of the results shown on the search results page.
Want to put the terms to work? Lesson 1 is free.