AI Search Glossary

SEO ranks pages in search results, AEO gets your brand named in AI answers. Compare their goals, KPIs and tactics, and see why most brands need both.

Agentic commerce is when AI agents search, compare and buy for shoppers. See how OpenAI and Google protocols work and why agents now compare brands for you.

Agentic search lets an AI agent run many searches, read pages and act for the user. See how Google and OpenAI search agents work and what it means for brands.

AI answer variability is why ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot give a new answer to the same prompt each time. Learn where it comes from and how to measure around it.

An AI citation is a link to a source inside an AI answer. Learn how ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode choose the pages they cite and how to earn citations.

AI crawlers are the bots AI companies use to train models, build search indexes and fetch pages live. See who runs which bot and what blocking each one changes.

An AI hallucination is a false statement an AI presents as fact. Learn why models hallucinate and how to catch errors and misattribution about your brand.

AI referral traffic is the visits your site gets from ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot. Learn how to spot it in GA4, why some lands in Direct and how to track it.

AI share of voice is your brand's slice of the mentions AI assistants give your market. See the formula, a worked example and the trap in its denominator.

AI visibility is how present your brand is in answers from ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI assistants. Learn what shapes it, how to check it and how to grow it.

An AI visibility score measures how often and how prominently AI assistants mention your brand. See the formula, a worked example and how to improve it.

An answer engine replies to a question with a written answer instead of a list of links. See how ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Claude find answers.

Answer engine optimization (AEO) gets your brand named in the answers of ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI assistants. See how it works and how it differs from GEO.

Answer-first formatting puts the direct answer in the first sentence, then the details. See what Microsoft and Google say about it, and where its limits lie.

Average position shows where your brand appears in the AI answers that name it, 1 being first. See the formula, a worked example and how to read it.

A brand mention is any time your brand is named, on the web or in an AI answer. See how mentions differ from citations and recommendations, and why they count.

Brand sentiment is the attitude people and AI answers express about your brand. Learn how it is measured, why AI repeats it and how to improve it.

Branded prompts name your brand, unbranded prompts only describe a need. Compare what each one tells you about your AI visibility and why you need both.

ChatGPT search, first tested as SearchGPT, answers with live web results and cited sources. Learn how it works and how a site becomes eligible to appear.

A citation gap is the set of pages AI answers cite that name your competitors but not you. Learn how to find these pages and close the gap, step by step.

Citation rate measures how often AI answers link to your site as a source. See the formula, how it differs from citation share and how to raise it.

ClaudeBot is the Anthropic crawler that collects training data. See how it differs from Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User, and how to write robots.txt rules.

Content chunking organizes a page into self-contained sections. Learn how AI engines retrieve passages and why Google says tiny chunks are not needed.

Content freshness is how recently a page was published or updated. See why ChatGPT cites newer pages than Google does, and why fake update dates do not help.

Conversational search lets people ask full questions and follow up while the engine keeps context. See how it differs from keyword search and why it matters.

Crawlability is whether bots can fetch and read your pages. See what stops AI crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot from reading a page, and how to fix it.

Digital PR earns a brand coverage on news sites, trade media and blogs. See how it works, where it turns into link spam, and why AI assistants cite it.

E-E-A-T means experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust. See what Google says about it, why it is not a ranking factor, and how it reaches AI answers.

Earned media is coverage you get from others without paying: press, reviews, comparisons. See why AI engines cite it far more than brand sites, with data.

In SEO and AI search, an entity is a uniquely identifiable thing, like a brand or a person. Learn how a brand becomes an entity that AI engines recognize.

Generative engine optimization (GEO) helps brands appear in AI answers. Learn where the term comes from, what the research really shows and how GEO works.

A GEO audit checks whether AI crawlers can reach your site, whether AI assistants name your brand and which pages they cite. See what to check and how often.

SEO earns rankings and clicks, GEO earns mentions and citations in AI answers. Compare their KPIs, what research says about each and which pages to work on.

Google AI Mode is the conversational AI search mode in Google Search. Learn how it works, how it differs from AI Overviews and how to track your brand.

Google AI Overviews are AI summaries shown above search results. Learn how they work, how SGE became AI Overviews, and what they change for clicks.

GPTBot is the OpenAI crawler that gathers training data. See how it differs from OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User, and how to block it but stay in ChatGPT search.

Grounding ties an AI answer to sources retrieved at prompt time, such as Google Search results. See how Gemini and ChatGPT ground answers and pick citations.

Information gain in SEO is the new information a page adds beyond what other results already say. See what Google's patent describes and how to add it.

JavaScript rendering builds page content in the browser. Googlebot runs JavaScript, but GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot do not. See what that hides from AI.

A knowledge graph stores facts about people, places and brands and how they connect. See how Google's Knowledge Graph works and why AI answers use it.

LLM stands for large language model, the AI behind ChatGPT and Gemini. Learn what an LLM knows about your brand from its training data and from web search.

A listicle is an article built around a ranked list, like "best CRMs for small teams". See why AI engines cite listicles so often, and what to avoid doing.

llms.txt is a proposed Markdown file that points AI agents to your key pages. See how it works and an example, and why studies find no effect on AI citations.

Mention rate is the share of AI answers that name your brand. See the formula, a worked example and how to raise it on ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot.

A prompt is the question you ask an AI assistant. In AI visibility tracking, it is a buyer question run on ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot to see who gets named.

Prompt tracking runs your buyers' questions on ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI assistants again and again to see when your brand shows up. Learn how to set it up.

Prompt volume estimates how often people ask AI assistants about a topic. See why no official data exists, how tools model it and how to pick prompts anyway.

Query fan-out is how AI search engines split one prompt into many searches. Learn how it works, why it shapes which pages get cited, and how to adapt.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) lets an AI model look up documents before it answers. Learn where RAG comes from and what it changes for your brand.

Robots.txt tells crawlers which URLs they may fetch. Learn how to write rules for AI crawlers like GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot, and what robots.txt cannot do.

Schema markup labels what a page contains for search engines. See how it works, what happened to FAQ schema, and why adding it does not raise AI citations.

Search everywhere optimization grows a brand's visibility beyond Google, on YouTube, TikTok, Reddit and AI assistants. See why it matters and where AI fits in.

Semantic search matches meaning, not keywords. Learn how embeddings and vector search work, and why AI engines can cite a page that never uses your words.

Share of search is your brand's share of all brand searches in your category. See Les Binet's formula, a worked example and how it relates to AI visibility.

Technical GEO makes your site readable for AI crawlers: bot access, JavaScript rendering, robots.txt and indexing. Plus what llms.txt and schema don't do.

A topic cluster links one pillar page to pages on each subtopic. See how clusters work, how they match the sub-queries AI engines run, and how to build one.

Topical authority is how strongly a site is seen as a go-to source on one subject. See what Google actually says about it and how it shapes AI citations.

Training data is the text an AI model learns from before release. See what goes into it, how the knowledge cutoff limits it and what it means for your brand.

An unlinked brand mention names your brand without linking to your site. Learn why these mentions, and co-citations, matter more in AI search than in SEO.

A zero-click search ends without a click on any result. See how common it is, how AI Overviews cut clicks to top pages, and how to measure your visibility.