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GEO Glossary

Definitions for key terms related to Generative Engine Optimization, AI Search, and website visibility.

A

  • AEO— Answer Engine Optimization – the practice of optimising content to appear in direct answers provided by AI search systems.
  • AI Citation— When an AI model references or attributes your website as a source of information in its response.
  • AI Crawler— A bot (e.g., GPTBot, ClaudeBot) that crawls websites specifically to train or inform AI models.
  • AI Search— Search experiences powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) that generate direct answers rather than lists of links.
  • Answer Engine— A search system that returns direct answers to user queries, often powered by AI, rather than a list of blue links.

B

  • Backlink— A link from another website to yours. A key signal of authority and trust for search engines and AI systems.

C

  • Crawl Budget— The number of pages a search engine bot will crawl on your site within a given time period.

D

  • Domain Authority— A predictive score for how well a website will rank on search engine result pages. Higher scores indicate stronger ranking potential.

G

  • GEO— Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of improving a website's content and technical structure so that AI-powered search systems can discover, understand, and potentially cite it.
  • GPTBot— OpenAI's crawler that accesses websites to improve ChatGPT's knowledge base.

I

  • Index— A search engine's database of web pages that can be served in search results. Pages must be indexed to appear in search results.

K

  • Keyword— A word or phrase that users type into search engines to find content. Keywords help search engines and AI systems understand what a page is about.

L

  • LLM— Large Language Model – an AI model trained on massive amounts of text to understand and generate human-like language.
  • llms.txt— A non-standard file that can be used to provide explicit instructions to AI crawlers about content usage and attribution.

N

  • Nofollow— A link attribute that tells search engines not to pass authority to the linked page. Often used for sponsored or untrusted links.

P

  • PerplexityBot— Perplexity's crawler that indexes content for its AI-powered search engine.

R

  • RAG— Retrieval-Augmented Generation – a technique where an LLM retrieves relevant information from external sources (like your website) before generating a response.

S

  • Schema Markup— A specific vocabulary (Schema.org) used to add structured data to web pages, helping machines understand context.
  • SERP— Search Engine Results Page – the page displayed after a user enters a query into a search engine.
  • Structured Data— A standardized format (often JSON-LD) for providing explicit information about a page's content to search engines and AI systems.

X

  • XML Sitemap— A file that lists a website's important pages to help search engines discover and index them more efficiently.

21 terms total