AEO Glossary
The essential vocabulary of Answer Engine Optimization — every term you’ll meet, defined plainly.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
The practice of optimizing your brand, content and data so AI answer engines find you, describe you accurately, and recommend you when users ask relevant questions.
Answer engine
Any AI system that responds to a question with a synthesized answer rather than a list of links — e.g. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
A near-synonym for AEO, emphasizing optimization for generative AI systems that create answers. AEO and GEO are used interchangeably by most practitioners.
LLM (Large Language Model)
The AI model (like GPT-4o, Claude or Gemini) that powers an answer engine by predicting and generating text from a prompt.
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
The technique where an answer engine retrieves live web or database results and feeds them to the model before generating an answer. It's why fresh, crawlable, well-structured content gets cited.
Citation / source
The links an answer engine shows to support its answer. Earning citations is a core AEO goal, especially on Perplexity and AI Overviews.
Recommendation rate
How often an AI engine names your business when asked a relevant buyer question. The single most important AEO metric.
Knowledge accuracy
Whether the AI's description of your business (services, location, positioning) is correct. Inconsistent facts across the web hurt this.
Entity / knowledge graph
A structured representation of your business as a 'thing' the AI understands, fed by schema, consistent listings and authoritative mentions.
Schema markup / structured data
Machine-readable tags (JSON-LD) that tell engines exactly what your content is — Organization, LocalBusiness, FAQ, Product, HowTo, etc.
llms.txt
A proposed plain-text file at your domain root that gives AI models a curated, easy-to-read map of your most important content.
E-E-A-T
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust — Google's quality framework and a strong signal for what AI engines choose to cite and recommend.
GPTBot / OAI-SearchBot / PerplexityBot
The crawlers AI companies use to read your site. Blocking them in robots.txt makes you invisible to that engine.
Hallucination
When an AI states something false about your business. AEO reduces hallucinations by making accurate facts easy to find and consistent.
Zero-click
When a user gets their answer directly from the AI without visiting any website — which is why being named in the answer matters more than ever.
Prompt / query
The question a user types into an answer engine. AEO starts with knowing the real buyer prompts in your category.
Share of voice (AI)
The percentage of relevant AI answers in which your brand appears, versus competitors.
Source presence
How well-represented you are on the third-party pages (directories, reviews, editorial) that AI engines pull from.
See how AI answer engines rank your business
Run a free AI Visibility Scan and find out exactly how ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews describe — and whether they recommend — your business today. Get a 4-dimension score and a prioritized fix plan in minutes.