Glossary
The words, defined
The vocabulary of AI search, in plain language. If we use a term with you, it means what it says here.
- AI Mode
- Google’s conversational search experience, where the answer is written by AI and follow-up questions keep the context.
- AI Overview
- The AI-written summary Google shows above some search results. It answers the question directly and links to a handful of sources.
- AI search visibility
- How often, and how accurately, AI engines name a business when someone asks a question it should be the answer to. Read more
- Answer engine
- A tool that responds to a question with a written answer instead of a list of links. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google’s AI features all work this way.
- Answer engine optimization (AEO)
- The practice of making a business easy for answer engines to find, trust and name. The outcome it aims at is AI search visibility.
- Baseline
- The honest measurement of where a business stands before any work begins. Every goal is measured against it, including the numbers that are bad.
- Citation
- When an AI answer names a business or links to a source as the basis for what it says. Being cited is the difference between being in the answer and being left out of it.
- E-E-A-T
- Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. The qualities Google’s quality guidelines ask raters to look for in content and the people behind it.
- Entity
- A specific, identifiable thing, such as a business, a person or a place, that search and AI engines try to recognize consistently across the web.
- Generative engine optimization (GEO)
- Another name for answer engine optimization, emphasizing engines that generate written answers.
- Google Business Profile
- The free listing that controls how a business appears in Google Maps and local results: name, hours, location, photos and reviews.
- Knowledge panel
- The box of facts Google shows about a recognized entity, usually beside the search results.
- llms.txt
- A proposed plain-text file at the root of a website that gives AI tools a short, curated map of its most important pages.
- Local pack
- The map and short list of nearby businesses Google shows for searches with local intent.
- sameAs
- A structured data property that lists a business’s official profiles on other sites, telling engines they all describe the same entity.
- Schema.org
- The shared vocabulary search engines use for structured data. It defines types like LocalBusiness, Person and Service, and the properties each can have.
- Structured data
- Code on a page that states facts in a machine-readable format, usually JSON-LD using the schema.org vocabulary. Read more
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