SEO and GEO glossary: AI search terms, explained.

Terms

AI Overview

A generated summary that appears at the top of some Google search results, answering the query directly and linking to sources.

AI Mode

A conversational search experience in Google Search that answers questions with generated responses and supports follow-up questions.

Answer engine

A search product built to return direct answers rather than lists of links, usually citing its sources.

Citation

A link or reference to a source shown alongside an AI-generated answer.

Consensus

Agreement among multiple independent sources on a fact or description; a strong signal for AI systems.

Crawler

An automated program that visits web pages to read their content, used by search engines and AI companies.

Digital PR

Earning coverage and links from online publications by providing newsworthy stories, data or expert commentary.

E-E-A-T

Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: qualities of helpful content described in Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines.

Entity

A distinct, identifiable thing such as a company, person, product or place, with attributes and relationships.

Entity sheet

A reference document listing the core facts about a brand that should be consistent everywhere.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

The practice of improving how AI systems that generate answers understand, cite and recommend a brand. See it explained in our free GEO diagrams.

JSON-LD

A format for adding structured data to web pages. Generate Organization JSON-LD for free.

Knowledge Graph

Google's database of entities and the relationships between them.

Large language model (LLM)

An AI model trained on large amounts of text to understand and generate language.

llms.txt

A proposed text file at the root of a website that summarizes the site for AI systems and lists its most important pages. Create one with our free llms.txt generator.

Prompt set

A fixed list of questions used to measure a brand's visibility in AI answers over time.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)

A method in which an AI system retrieves relevant documents, often through search, and uses them to write its answer.

robots.txt

A file at the root of a website that tells crawlers which parts of the site they may access.

sameAs

A structured data property that lists the URLs of an entity's official profiles elsewhere on the web. Add sameAs links with our Organization schema generator.

Schema.org

A shared vocabulary for structured data used by major search engines. Build Schema.org Organization markup for free.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The practice of improving a website's visibility in search engine results.

Share of answers

The percentage of questions in a prompt set where a brand is mentioned in AI answers; similar to what some practitioners call share of voice or share of model. Measure it with our free AI Visibility Checklist.

Structured data

Code added to web pages that states facts explicitly in a machine-readable format. Try our free Organization schema generator.

Training data

The text an AI model learned from before it was released; the source of its built-in knowledge.

Zero-click search

A search that ends without the user clicking through to any website, because the answer was provided on the results page or in the AI response.

Put these terms to work with the free AI Visibility Checklist. Want to see these ideas in practice? Listen to Be the Answer, our podcast on SEO and AI search, or see how our GEO services and technical SEO services apply them.