Glossary · 28 terms
The vocabulary, without the sales pitch.
Every term below is defined in one self-contained paragraph, so it can be read, quoted or argued with on its own. Claims here are about how the mechanism works, not about what it will earn you.
01 Core
What the discipline is called, and why.
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)
Making a brand appear in the answers AI assistants write.
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Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)
Optimising to be the answer, not a result in a list.
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Answer Engine
A system that answers a question directly instead of listing links.
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AI Citation
When an assistant attributes part of its answer to your page.
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LLM Visibility
Whether a language model knows a brand and names it.
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Grounding
Tying a generated answer to sources it can be traced back to.
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Hallucination
A confident model statement that no source supports.
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02 Technical
The machinery that decides whether you can be cited.
Retrieval
A model fetching live pages while composing an answer.
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Answer-Time Crawler
A bot that fetches your page while an assistant is writing a reply.
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Entity
A thing an engine can identify and hold facts about.
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Schema Markup
Machine-readable facts embedded in a page.
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sameAs
Links that prove your entity is the same one elsewhere.
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llms.txt
A plain-text map of a site, written for AI assistants.
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robots.txt
The file that decides which bots may fetch your pages.
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JSON-LD Validation
Checking that your structured data actually parses.
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AI Crawl Pathway
The route a page travels from request to being quoted.
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Passage Ranking
Retrieval that scores sections of a page, not the whole page.
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Semantic Triple
A fact in three parts: subject, predicate, object.
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Knowledge Graph
A store of entities and how they relate to each other.
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Vector Embedding
Text turned into numbers, so meaning can be compared by distance.
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03 Measurement
How visibility is counted when there are no clicks.
Share of Answer
How often an assistant names you, against how often it names rivals.
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Zero-Click Search
A search that ends without anyone visiting a website.
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Prompt Set
The fixed questions a visibility measure is built on.
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Citation Gap
The sources engines cite for your category, minus the ones you're on.
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Prompt Market Fit
Whether the questions you're measured on are the ones buyers ask.
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Unlinked Brand Mention
Your name on a page that never links to you, which still counts.
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04 Content
What makes a passage worth quoting.
From theory to your site
Which of these is costing you?
The free checker fetches your site the way the answer-time crawlers do and scores what comes back, so the terms above stop being abstract and start being a list of findings with your domain on them.