GEO and AI Search Glossary
When a term in a guide is unfamiliar, look it up here. Every entry opens with a one-sentence definition.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
GEO is optimization that shapes content and structure so generative AI cites your site as a source in its answers.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
AEO is optimization aimed at having your content selected for the answer box or snippet at the top of search results.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO is optimization for ranking in search results, and its outcome measure is clicks.
AI Overviews
AI Overviews are AI-generated summary answers shown at the top of Google results, presented together with links to the pages behind them.
AI crawlers
AI crawlers are automated programs operated by AI companies to fetch web documents, and each company runs several of them for different purposes.
Citation
A citation is the link an AI shows to the source it used as the basis for an answer.
Indexing
Indexing is a search engine reading a page and registering it in its own database, and it is the precondition for appearing in search and in AI answers.
Snippet
A snippet is the excerpt shown under the title in search results, and it also figures in whether a page is eligible for AI features.
Passage
A passage is the paragraph-sized chunk an AI extracts from a document and uses as evidence, rather than the whole page.
Answer-First
Answer-First is writing so that the sentence immediately after a heading answers the question that heading raises, completely, on its own.
llms.txt
llms.txt is a markdown-formatted text file at the site root that tells AI systems what to read first on this site.
robots.txt
robots.txt is a file at the site root that specifies which crawlers may fetch which parts of the site.
Structured data (Schema / JSON-LD)
Structured data is markup that states a page's meaning in a machine-readable form, most commonly written as JSON-LD.
E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust)
E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust, the criteria used to judge whether the source behind content is credible.