AEO & GEO glossary: Ai search terms, explained plainly.
36 terms you’ll meet in Ai search, from answer engines and query fan-out to citations, entities and Ai crawlers, each defined in a sentence or two.
Core concepts
AEO (answer engine optimization)
The work of making your content the best direct answer to a specific question, so that featured snippets, voice assistants and Ai summaries use it, ideally with your name and a link attached. Learn more.
GEO (generative engine optimization)
The work of getting your business retrieved, cited and recommended by generative Ai engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google’s Ai Overviews. Learn more.
SEO (search engine optimization)
The work of helping search engines find, understand and rank your pages so that people click through from search results. It is the foundation AEO and GEO are built on. Learn more.
Ai visibility
How often, and how favorably, Ai engines mention, cite or recommend a business when people ask the questions its buyers ask. Learn more.
Answer engine
Any system that responds to a question with an answer rather than a list of links: featured snippets, voice assistants, Ai chat assistants and Ai summaries in search.
Generative engine
An answer engine that writes a new response with a large language model, often after searching the web, rather than quoting a single page. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude are examples.
Zero-click search
A search where the person gets what they need from the results page or Ai answer and doesn’t click through to any website. Being named in the answer matters more when clicks are rarer.
How Ai engines work
Large language model (LLM)
The kind of Ai model behind ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and similar tools. It is trained on large amounts of text and generates answers word by word.
Training data
The text a model learned from before release. Brands mentioned often and consistently across the public web are more likely to be “known” to a model even without a live search.
Knowledge cutoff
The date after which a model’s training data ends. For anything newer, or anything local and current, engines rely on a live web search.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
A method where the engine first retrieves relevant pages, usually through a web search, and then writes its answer from them. Most recommendation and local answers work this way. Learn more.
Grounding
Tying an Ai answer to retrieved sources so its claims can be checked, typically shown a