Glossary
The language of AI visibility.
Plain definitions of the terms behind getting recommended by AI, from AEO and GEO to schema markup and E-E-A-T. Each links out to the guides and the blog.
- AI Overviews
- Google's AI-generated answer that appears above traditional results, synthesizing and citing sources.
- Answer Engine
- An AI system that responds to a question with a direct, synthesized answer instead of a list of links.
- Answer Engine OptimizationAEO
- Optimizing a website to be read and cited by AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.
- Canonical URL
- The single preferred address for a page, declared so engines consolidate duplicates onto one URL.
- Crawlability
- Whether automated crawlers, including AI bots, can reach and fetch your pages at all.
- E-E-A-T
- Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust, the credibility signals engines use to decide who to rely on.
- FAQ Schema (FAQPage)
- FAQPage structured data that wraps visible questions and answers in machine-readable form AI engines can lift.
- Featured Snippet
- A short answer Google extracts to the top of search results, a precursor to today's AI answers.
- Generative Engine OptimizationGEO
- Influencing what generative AI models say about you across all of their outputs, the umbrella over AEO.
- JSON-LD
- A JSON-based format for adding Schema.org structured data to a page in a single script block.
- Knowledge Graph
- A structured network of entities and relationships engines use to understand who and what things are.
- llms.txt
- A plain-text Markdown file at your site root that gives AI tools a concise map of your most important content.
- Retrieval-Augmented GenerationRAG
- When an AI fetches live, external documents to ground its answer rather than relying only on training data.
- robots.txt
- A root-level file that tells crawlers which parts of your site they may or may not access.
- Schema Markup (Structured Data)
- Schema.org code that tells engines exactly what a page is, organization, product, FAQ, usually as JSON-LD.
- Search Engine OptimizationSEO
- Optimizing a site to rank in traditional search engine results, the foundation AEO and GEO build on.
- Server-Side RenderingSSR
- Generating a page's HTML on the server so content is present without running JavaScript.
- XML Sitemap
- A file listing your site's URLs so crawlers can discover and prioritize your pages.