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AEO/GEO Glossary

Every term you need to understand Answer Engine Optimization and Generative Engine Optimization - written for indie SaaS founders, not enterprise marketing directors.

30 terms across 4 categories.

Core Concepts

8 terms

AI Brand Monitoring

AI brand monitoring is the practice of systematically tracking when and how your brand is mentioned in answers generated by AI systems such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini.

AI Overviews

AI Overviews is Google's feature that displays a generated AI answer at the top of search results pages, above organic listings, synthesized from content across the web.

AI Visibility

AI visibility is the degree to which your brand is present and accurately represented in the answers generated by AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini.

Answer Engine

An answer engine is an AI system that responds to user questions with generated prose answers rather than returning a ranked list of links to websites.

Answer Engine Optimization

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of shaping your brand's presence so that AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity include you in their generated answers.

Generative Engine

A generative engine is an AI system that creates new text in response to a query, as opposed to retrieving and ranking existing documents - the underlying technology behind modern answer engines.

Generative Engine Optimization

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of optimizing your content and brand presence specifically for AI systems that generate prose answers, as opposed to returning ranked document lists.

LLM SEO

LLM SEO is the emerging practice of optimizing your brand and content to rank favorably within large language model outputs, analogous to how traditional SEO targets search engine rankings.

Metrics

7 terms

AI Share of Voice

AI Share of Voice is your brand's percentage of total brand mentions across AI-generated answers in a given category, relative to the total mentions of all tracked competitors.

Citation Tracking

Citation tracking in AEO is the practice of monitoring which URLs are returned as sources by AI systems - particularly Perplexity - when answering queries related to your brand or category.

Mention

A mention is an instance where your brand name appears in an AI-generated response to a query, regardless of whether the AI provides a source URL for the reference.

Position in AI Answers

Position in AI answers refers to where your brand appears within an AI-generated response - whether you are listed first, second, or further down - as a measure of the strength of your AI recommendation.

Prompt Volume

Prompt volume is the estimated number of queries that users send to AI systems per month in a given category or topic area, used to prioritize which prompts are worth tracking.

Sentiment in AI Answers

Sentiment in AI answers refers to whether an AI system's language about your brand is positive (a recommendation), neutral (a factual mention), or negative (a criticism or warning).

Visibility Score

Visibility Score is the percentage of your tracked prompts in which your brand is mentioned at least once by a given AI system, expressed as a number from 0 to 100.

Technical

10 terms

AI Crawlability

AI crawlability refers to how easily AI systems and their web crawlers can access, read, and accurately extract information from your website to use in training data or real-time retrieval.

Entity Extraction

Entity extraction is the process of identifying and isolating named entities - such as brand names, product names, and company names - from unstructured AI response text to determine whether your brand was mentioned.

Grounding

Grounding in AI refers to the practice of anchoring a model's generated answers to specific, verifiable source documents retrieved at query time, reducing hallucination and improving factual accuracy.

Hallucination

Hallucination in AI refers to when a language model generates plausible-sounding but factually incorrect information, such as inventing product features, wrong pricing, or incorrect brand descriptions.

Large Language Model (LLM)

A Large Language Model (LLM) is an AI system trained on vast amounts of text data that can generate human-like prose responses to questions and instructions, forming the core technology behind modern answer engines.

llms.txt

llms.txt is a plain-text file placed at the root of a website that provides a structured summary of the site's content and purpose, designed to help AI language models and crawlers understand the site efficiently.

Multi-Sampling

Multi-sampling is the practice of running each tracked prompt through an AI model multiple times per measurement cycle to produce statistically robust visibility scores rather than single-run snapshots.

Prompt Sampling

Prompt sampling is the process of running a single query through an AI system multiple times to account for output variability, producing a more statistically reliable measure of whether your brand is mentioned.

Query Fan-Out

Query fan-out is a technique used by some AI systems to automatically expand a single user query into multiple related sub-queries, then synthesize the results - increasing the breadth of what the model retrieves and considers.

RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)

RAG is a technique where an AI system fetches relevant documents from external sources at query time and uses that content to ground its generated answer, reducing hallucinations and enabling up-to-date responses.

Optimization

5 terms

Track your AEO score across ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.

Free tier: 1 brand, 10 prompts, 2 LLMs. No credit card required.

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