Generative search core terms
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
- GEO is the practice of optimising a website so generative answer engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot can retrieve, extract and cite it. Its unit of success is a citation inside an answer, not a ranked link.
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
- AEO is optimising content to be the direct answer to a question, whether that answer appears in a featured snippet, a voice assistant or an AI chat response. In practice the term is used interchangeably with GEO.
- AI SEO / LLM SEO
- AI SEO and LLM SEO are informal names for the same discipline as GEO: making a site legible and quotable to large language models rather than only to classic ranking algorithms.
- AI search visibility
- AI search visibility is how often and how accurately a brand or page is surfaced inside AI-generated answers. It is measured through citations, mentions and referral traffic from assistants rather than through keyword rankings.
- Citation
- A citation is an explicit source link or named attribution an answer engine attaches to a generated statement. Citations are the primary conversion event of GEO because they carry both credit and clicks.
Signals SeoFightr measures
- Extractability
- Extractability is how easily a single sentence or paragraph can be lifted out of a page and still be true and understandable on its own. Answer-first writing raises it; content that only makes sense in sequence lowers it.
- Evidence
- Evidence is the presence of checkable facts — numbers, dates, named sources, methodology — that let a model treat a statement as verifiable rather than as a marketing claim.
- Entity identity
- Entity identity is how clearly a page declares who is speaking: organisation name, author, logo, and sameAs links that connect the site to known profiles. Models prefer to cite sources they can resolve to a known entity.
- Question coverage
- Question coverage is how well a page matches the full natural-language questions people ask assistants, rather than short keyword fragments.
- Citability
- Citability is the technical permission and stability required to be quoted: server-rendered content, stable URLs, AI crawler access in robots.txt, and a machine-readable site summary.
- Crawlability
- Crawlability is whether a bot can reach and read a page: robots directives, status codes, canonical consistency, and sitemap discoverability.
Technical and file-level terms
- llms.txt
- llms.txt is a plain-text file at a site's root that gives language models a short factual summary of what the site is and which pages matter. It is a proposed convention, not a standard, and it is cheap to add.
- robots.txt
- robots.txt is a root-level file that tells crawlers which paths they may fetch. For GEO it matters twice: it can block AI crawlers such as GPTBot and PerplexityBot, or explicitly welcome them.
- Structured data (JSON-LD)
- Structured data is machine-readable markup, usually schema.org vocabulary in JSON-LD, that states what a page is about — Organization, Article, FAQPage, Product — instead of leaving it to be inferred.
- Canonical URL
- A canonical URL is the address a page declares as its authoritative version. When it points elsewhere, crawlers attribute the page's title, description and preview image to that other URL.
- hreflang
- hreflang annotations tell search engines that two URLs are the same content in different languages, so the right version is served without the pages competing with each other.
- Server-side rendering (SSR)
- SSR means the HTML arrives from the server already containing the content. Many AI crawlers execute little or no JavaScript, so content that only appears after hydration may not exist for them at all.
- Core Web Vitals
- Core Web Vitals are Google's user-experience metrics — largest contentful paint, interaction to next paint and cumulative layout shift — used as ranking signals for page experience.
How models use your content
- RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
- RAG is the pattern where a model first retrieves documents from a search index or vector store, then writes an answer grounded in what it retrieved. Most AI search products are RAG systems, which is why classic indexability still governs GEO.
- Grounding
- Grounding is tying a generated statement to retrieved source material so it can be attributed and checked. Ungrounded output is where hallucinations come from.
- Chunking
- Chunking is splitting a page into passage-sized pieces before indexing. Because retrieval happens at chunk level, self-contained sections outperform long undifferentiated prose.
- Embedding
- An embedding is a numeric vector representing the meaning of a chunk of text, used to match a user's question to relevant passages by similarity rather than by exact keyword.
- Hallucination
- A hallucination is a confident but unsupported statement generated by a model. Clear, evidence-backed pages reduce the chance of a model inventing details about your brand.
- Knowledge cutoff
- A knowledge cutoff is the date after which a model's training data ends. Live retrieval bridges the gap, which is why being crawlable now matters more than having been popular in the past.
- AI crawler
- An AI crawler is a bot operated by an AI company — GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended — that fetches pages for training or live answer retrieval. Blocking them removes you from those answers.
Glossary FAQ
What is the difference between SEO and GEO?
SEO optimises for a ranked link and a click; GEO optimises for an extracted statement and a citation inside a generated answer. GEO is built on top of SEO — an uncrawlable site fails both.
Is GEO the same as AEO?
In practice yes. AEO (answer engine optimization) emphasises being the direct answer to a question, while GEO emphasises being retrievable and citable by generative models. The tactics overlap almost completely.
Which term should I use with clients?
Use GEO or AI search visibility. Both are becoming the common labels, and both describe the measurable outcome — citations and mentions inside AI answers — rather than a tactic.