Glossary

AI search terms, in plain English.

Short, accurate definitions of the words used in generative engine optimisation, with an example of each and links to go deeper.

A

AI crawler: An AI crawler is a bot run by an AI company that visits web pages to collect content. It may train models, power live AI search answers, or fetch a page a user asked about.
AI Mode: AI Mode is a Google Search mode where the results page becomes an AI conversation. It breaks a question into many searches, writes an answer with links to sources and lets people ask follow-up questions.
AI Overviews: AI Overviews are the AI-written summaries Google shows at the top of some search results. They answer the query in a few sentences or paragraphs and link to the web pages the summary drew on.
AI referral traffic: AI referral traffic is visits to your website that come from AI tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude or Copilot. It usually happens when someone clicks a link or citation in an AI answer.
AI visibility: AI visibility is how often, how prominently and how accurately a brand appears in answers from AI engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews. It covers the questions its buyers actually ask.
AI visibility score: An AI visibility score is a single number that sums up how visible a brand is in AI answers. It is usually built from how often the brand is mentioned, where it appears and how it is described.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO): Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the practice of shaping content so search features and AI assistants can lift it as a direct answer. Examples include a featured snippet, a voice answer or a passage in an AI response.

B

Brand mention: A brand mention in AI search is any time an AI engine names your business in its answer, with or without a link. It is the most basic measure of whether the engine knows you and considers you.

C

Citation: A citation in AI search is a link an AI engine shows as the source for part of its answer. Being cited means the engine used your page, and it gives readers a way to click through to it.

E

E-E-A-T: E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. It is the set of qualities Google's search quality raters use to judge content, and Google says trust is the most important of the four.
Entity: An entity is a distinct, identifiable thing, such as a business, person, place, product or brand. Search engines and AI models recognise it and connect it to facts, rather than treating it as a string of words.

F

Featured snippet: A featured snippet is a Google search result that shows a short extract from a web page first, above or among the normal results. It answers the query directly before the page title and link.

G

Generative engine optimisation (GEO): Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the work of making a brand more likely to be mentioned, described correctly and cited in AI answers. These answers come from engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews.
Grounding: Grounding is when an AI model bases its answer on information it looks up at the time, such as search results or documents, rather than only on what it learned in training. Grounded answers usually cite sources.

H

Hallucination: A hallucination is when an AI engine states something false as if it were true, such as wrong prices, opening hours, services or history for a business. The answer sounds confident, which makes the error easy to miss.

J

JSON-LD: JSON-LD is a way of writing structured data as a small block of code inside a web page. It describes the page's content using schema.org terms, and it is the format Google recommends for structured data.

K

Knowledge graph: A knowledge graph is a database of entities, such as people, places and businesses, and the links between them. Google's Knowledge Graph feeds the fact panels in search, and a website can publish its own small graph through structured data.

L

LLM SEO: LLM SEO is a name for optimising a brand and its content so it works well with large language models. These models, such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, then mention it, describe it correctly and cite its pages.
llms.txt: llms.txt is a proposed Markdown file placed at a website's root that gives AI tools a short, hand-picked guide to the site's most useful pages and what each one covers.

M

Map pack: The map pack is the block of local business listings Google shows with a map for searches with local intent, such as plumber near me. It usually lists three businesses drawn from Google Business Profile.

N

NAP consistency: NAP consistency means your business name, address and phone number are written the same way everywhere they appear online, including your website, Google Business Profile, directories and social profiles.

P

People Also Ask: People Also Ask is the Google search feature that shows a box of related questions. Each question expands to show a short answer taken from a web page, with a link to that page.
Prominence: Prominence is how strongly a brand features in an AI answer, beyond whether it is mentioned at all. It reflects where the brand appears, whether it is recommended, whether its pages are cited and the tone used.
Prompt: A prompt is the question or instruction a person types into an AI engine. In AI visibility tracking, a prompt is one of the buyer questions you run through the engines to see which brands they name.
Prompt set: A prompt set is the list of buyer questions a brand tracks in AI engines. The same prompts run on a schedule, so changes in mentions, position and citations can be compared fairly over time.

Q

Query fan-out: Query fan-out is when an AI search system splits one question into many related searches, runs them at the same time and combines what it finds into a single answer. Google uses it in AI Mode.

R

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG): Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a method where an AI system first retrieves relevant documents or web pages, then uses them to write its answer. It lets models use fresh or specific information they were not trained on.

S

Schema markup: Schema markup is structured data added to a web page, using the schema.org vocabulary. It tells search engines and AI systems exactly what the page is about, such as a business, product, article, event or FAQ.
Sentiment: Sentiment is the tone an AI answer uses when it talks about a brand, whether positive, neutral or negative. It shows how an engine describes you, beyond whether it mentions you at all.
Share of voice: Share of voice in AI search is the portion of brand mentions in AI answers that go to your brand, compared with competitors, across a set of prompts. Some tools weight it by where each brand appears.
Source domain: A source domain is a website that AI engines cite when they answer questions in your topic, such as a review site, directory, news site, forum or competitor's site. It shows where engines get their information.

Z

Zero-click search: Zero-click search is when a person gets what they need from the search results page or from an AI answer, and leaves without clicking through to any website.

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