Answer engine optimization (AEO): Making a business easy for AI assistants to find, understand and trust, so it is named and cited in their answers.
Generative engine optimization (GEO): Another name for the same goal, focused on generative AI answers.
AI Overviews: AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of some Google search results, with links to sources.
AI Mode: A conversational search mode in Google that answers with AI and runs many searches behind one question.
Share of answer: The share of a fixed set of buyer questions where an AI platform names your business.
Citation: A source an AI answer links to or credits, such as your website, a directory or an article.
Query fan-out: When an AI system splits one question into several smaller searches before answering.
Grounding: When an AI system checks or bases its answer on retrieved sources rather than only its training.
Entity: A clearly defined thing, like your business, that platforms recognise consistently across sources.
Schema markup: Structured data in your page code that describes your business, services and FAQs in a standard format.
llms.txt: A plain-text file that points AI tools to a site’s most useful pages. Optional and not a ranking factor.
hreflang: A tag that tells search engines which language and region a page is for, such as en-CA or fr-CA.
OAI-SearchBot: OpenAI’s crawler for ChatGPT search results.
PerplexityBot: Perplexity’s crawler for indexing pages it can cite.
Bingbot: Microsoft’s search crawler; Copilot is grounded in Bing’s index.
Prompt set: The fixed list of buyer questions you track every month.