GEO & AI search glossary
Plain-English definitions for every term you'll meet while optimizing for AI search. Click any term for a full explanation, examples, and related concepts.
Answer Engine Optimization — optimizing for direct-answer surfaces like AI assistants and voice search.
An automated bot operated by an AI company that fetches web pages for training or live answering.
Google's AI-generated answers that appear above the classical search results.
Measuring how often AI engines cite your domain in answers to target queries.
Google's quality framework: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness.
Numerical vectors that represent the meaning of text, used by AI to find semantically similar content.
Optimizing for entity recognition — making sure search engines know exactly who or what your brand is.
Schema.org type for marking up question-and-answer content so search and AI engines can extract Q&A pairs.
Generative Engine Optimization — optimizing for citation by AI chat, search, and assistants.
OpenAI's web crawler that gathers training data for ChatGPT models.
Schema.org type for marking up step-by-step instructions.
A protocol that pings search engines (Bing, Yandex) the moment a URL is published or updated.
A structured database of entities (people, places, things) and their relationships, used by search engines to disambiguate.
A plain-text file at the root of your site that tells AI models which URLs are worth reading.
Schema.org type that identifies the entity behind a website.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation — the technique behind most AI search citations.
A file at the root of your domain that tells crawlers which paths they're allowed to fetch.
A schema.org property used to declare authoritative external profiles for an entity.
Structured data (usually JSON-LD) that describes a page's content in a machine-readable way.
Search based on meaning rather than exact keyword matching.
Schema.org property marking the parts of a page suitable for voice playback.
Search powered by embedding similarity instead of keyword matching.
Search queries spoken to voice assistants (Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant) instead of typed.
Searches that end without the user clicking through to any website.