AI visibility guide
GEO and AI visibility glossary
The short answer
The words that come up most when people talk about appearing in AI answers, each with a short definition and, where it matters, what the evidence says.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)
- The work of getting a business into AI assistants' answers, described correctly. See what is GEO.
- AEO and LLMO
- Other names for much the same thing: answer engine optimisation and optimisation for large language models. Most of the industry says GEO.
- AI visibility
- How often AI assistants name you in answers about your field, out of all the answers measured.
- Mention
- When the answer names your brand in the text, with or without a link.
- Citation
- When the answer links to your site as a source. In AI answers this means a source link; in local SEO ‘citations’ also means directory listings.
- Google AI Overviews
- The AI-written summary Google shows above some results. See AI Overviews.
- AI Mode
- Google's conversational AI search. The same rules as AI Overviews apply.
- AI crawler
- The program that reads pages for an engine. The search ones: OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI), PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot and Googlebot. Training crawlers such as GPTBot or ClaudeBot are separate.
- robots.txt
- The file at the root of your site that says which crawlers may come in, and where. One mistake there can shut you out of every engine.
- Snippet
- The text a search engine shows from your page. Google requires a page to be eligible for a snippet before its AI features can use it.
- Structured data (schema)
- Code that describes the page for machines: business, product, questions. It helps consistency and rich results; as a way to get cited by AI, there's no evidence.
- Entity
- Your business as a ‘thing’ engines recognise: its name, what it does, where it is, who runs it. The more consistent the facts everywhere, the better it's recognised.
- Query fan-out
- When an assistant splits a question into several smaller searches and combines the results. That's why it can cite pages that don't rank for the original question.
- Snapshot
- One run of a question through an assistant. Answers vary between runs, so one run can't measure visibility.
- llms.txt
- A proposed file that summarises a site for language models. No engine documents using it, and a study of about 300,000 domains found no link with citations.
- IndexNow
- A notice your site sends to Bing and other engines when a page changes, so they read it again sooner. Microsoft recommends it so its AI uses the current version.
- Search Console
- Google's free tool for seeing how people find you. Visits from AI Overviews and AI Mode are included in its Performance report, and a separate generative AI report shows impressions.
Sources
- Google Search Central, ‘AI features and your website’ (2025-12-10)
- OpenAI, crawlers (2026-10)
- Perplexity, crawlers (2026-10)
- Anthropic, crawlers (2026-04-07)
- Search Engine Journal on SE Ranking's llms.txt study (2025-11-20)
- Ahrefs, schema and AI citations (2026-05)