The vocabulary of visibility in AI answers.

Optimization aimed at surfacing a direct answer in answer engines. AEO focuses on question-and-answer formats and immediately usable snippets; it overlaps largely with GEO.

An AI system able to chain several actions autonomously to reach a goal: search, reason, use tools. Agents are starting to carry out searches and purchases themselves on the user's behalf.

Summaries generated by Google's AI (Gemini) and shown at the top of search results. They answer the question directly, which sharply reduces clicks to source sites.

Basing an AI's answer on retrieved, verifiable sources rather than on its memory alone. Grounding reduces hallucinations and enables source citation.

A metric estimating a domain's strength, historically based on the number and quality of its inbound links. In GEO, it is complemented by topical depth.

A site's credibility on a specific topic, measured by the density and consistency of its content. A highly specialised site can be cited ahead of a large generalist outlet.

A link pointing to your site from another site. A historic SEO authority signal, it retains value in GEO because AIs take a brand's digital footprint into account.

A database that stores content as numerical vectors, allowing passages to be retrieved by closeness of meaning. It sits at the heart of retrieval systems (RAG).

The results page shown when someone searches a brand's exact name. Controlling it provides an identity foundation that engines and AIs reuse.

A fragment of content that an AI retrieves and cites, rather than a whole page. Structuring your content into clear, self-contained passages makes it easier to extract.

A content's ability to be reused as-is by a generative AI. In GEO, the goal is no longer to rank well but to be citable: clear, sourced, extractable statements.

A reference to a source shown in an AI-generated answer. It's the unit of GEO visibility: your brand appears in it, or not.

A program that automatically browses the web to crawl and index pages. Both engines and AIs use dedicated crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, etc.).

The proportion of users who click after seeing a result. The rise of AI answers drives CTR down, since the answer is given without a click.

Markup that explicitly describes the meaning of content to machines (via Schema.org). It significantly improves how engines and AIs read a page.

The body of texts used to train a model. How often a brand appears in that corpus influences its likelihood of being cited.

The richness and clarity of named entities (brands, places, people, concepts) within content. A high density of consistent entities helps the AI understand and cite.

Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: a quality framework for sources. A named, qualified author, cited sources and a recognised reputation increase the chances of being referenced by AIs.

A numerical representation of a word, sentence or document as a vector. Content that is close in meaning has close embeddings.

An identifiable, named object (brand, person, place, concept) that engines and AIs recognise. Consistency of an entity's name, identical everywhere, is a visibility signal.

A type of structured data that marks up a page's questions and answers. It helps AIs extract direct, citable answers.

A snippet highlighted above Google's classic results. A forerunner of direct answers, it favours concise, well-structured content. Today overshadowed by AI Overviews.

The amount of text a model can take into account at once. The larger it is, the more sources the model can incorporate into its answer.

Additional training of a model on specialised data, to adapt it to a specific domain or style.

How recent a piece of content is. Generative engines favour recent information; updated content stays citable, old content drops off.

The set of techniques aimed at getting a brand cited, recommended or favourably referenced in the answers of generative AIs. Where SEO targets a position, GEO targets a mention.

Google's model family and conversational assistant, integrated into search and AI Overviews.

OpenAI's crawler. Allowing it in robots.txt lets its systems access your content.

A structured network of entities and their relationships, used by engines to understand the world. Appearing in it as a recognised entity strengthens visibility.

An AI answer that is factually wrong but stated with confidence. For a brand, a hallucination can spread incorrect information to a prospect — hence the importance of a clear, sourced presence. Increasingly well handled by the latest AI models.

Artificial intelligence that produces original content (text, image, code) rather than merely classifying or predicting.

Recording a page in an engine's database, a prerequisite for any visibility. A page that isn't indexed can be neither ranked nor cited.

The phase of using an already-trained model to generate an answer to a query, as opposed to the training phase.

The recommended format for embedding Schema.org structured data in a page, as a machine-readable block of code.

The date beyond which a model has no knowledge from its training. For later events, it relies on real-time web search.

A model trained on vast text corpora to understand and generate language. Generative engines are built on LLMs.

A file, placed at a site's root, that describes its content and structure to language models. An emerging standard meant to help AIs understand the site.

The set of long, specific queries, individually rare but numerous in aggregate. Questions put to AIs often fall in the long tail.

Mistral AI is a French generative-AI engine. It is one of the main answer engines to monitor in GEO.

An engine that answers a question by synthesising information from several sources via an LLM, with built-in citations. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity are the main ones.

A mention of a brand without a hyperlink (forum, podcast, article). In GEO these mentions carry real value, whereas they counted for little in classic SEO.

A short summary of a page, shown in search results. It influences the click and gives engines a condensed view of the content.

A model able to handle several formats — text, image, audio, video. AI visibility is gradually extending to visual and audio content.

Domination of a micro-topic through an exceptional density of specialised content. It lets a niche site be cited ahead of large generalist outlets.

A technique for identifying named entities (people, brands, places) in a text. It underpins how well engines recognise a brand.

Natural language processing: the field of AI dedicated to understanding and generating human language.

A brand's relative weight against its competitors: out of all a sector's mentions in AI answers, what share is its own. A key barometer metric.

An AI-based answer engine that systematically cites its sources. Its transparency makes it a prime observation ground for GEO.

A natural-language instruction given to an AI. The wording of the prompt influences the answer — and therefore the brands cited in it.

The mechanism by which an AI breaks a question into several sub-queries, searched separately, before synthesising a single answer.

An architecture where the AI retrieves external documents in real time, then generates its answer from them. It enables source citation and factual grounding.

A query answered directly on the results page or by an AI, without the user visiting a site. A major trend that makes the citation more valuable than the click.

Search based on meaning and intent rather than exact keyword matching. It rewards clear, well-contextualised content.

A file at a site's root that tells crawlers what they may access. It's where you allow or block AI crawlers.

Automated generation of a large number of pages from a structured database, to cover long-tail queries at scale.

The standard vocabulary for marking up structured data, understood by engines and AIs. It describes organisations, articles, FAQs, products, etc.

Optimization aimed at ranking a page among search-engine results. SEO and GEO converge: good SEO feeds AI visibility.

A search engine's results page. Increasingly occupied by AI-generated answers at the top.

The initial name for Google's generative search experience, since rolled out as AI Overviews and AI Mode.

A file listing a site's URLs to guide crawlers and speed up indexing.

The proportion of AI answers, across a set of prompts, in which a brand is cited. AI visibility is expressed as a frequency, not a fixed position.

A unit of text (often a word fragment) processed by a language model. The cost and length of exchanges are measured in tokens.

The reference URL designated for a page that exists in several versions, to avoid duplicate content and concentrate signals on a single address.

Open knowledge bases that feed the entity graphs of engines and AIs. Being referenced there as a clear entity strengthens a brand's recognition.