AI Search Terms, Explained Plainly

An AI crawler is an automated bot that AI companies use to read web pages, either to train models or to fetch current information when answering a question. Examples include OpenAI's GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot, and PerplexityBot. Sites control their access through robots.txt and firewall settings, so a misconfigured site can block the tools it wants to be found by.

AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of some Google search results. They answer the query directly and link to the pages they draw from. Google decides when to show one and which sources to cite.

An answer engine is a search tool that responds to a question with a direct answer rather than a list of links. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google AI Overviews all work this way to some degree. Optimizing for them is sometimes called answer engine optimization (AEO), a close relative of GEO.

Brand authority is how recognized and trusted a business is across the web, beyond its own website. It shows up in reviews, press coverage, directory listings and mentions on other reputable sites. AI assistants draw on these outside sources when deciding which businesses to name, so what others say about you carries real weight.

Citability describes how easy it is for an AI system to quote or reference a piece of content. Content is more citable when it answers a question directly, states facts plainly and still makes sense when lifted out of the page. It's a working term in GEO rather than a formal standard.

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. It comes from Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines, which human raters use to judge the quality of search results. It isn't a single ranking factor, but it describes the qualities Google's systems aim to reward, with trust treated as the most important of the four.

An entity is a distinct, identifiable thing, such as a business, person, place or product, that search engines and AI systems can recognize and connect to facts. For a business, being a clear entity means being described the same way everywhere: the same name, address, services and details. Consistent signals make it easier for machines to know who you are.

Generative engine optimization is the work of making a business easier for AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews to find, understand and cite. It builds on SEO foundations, such as crawlable pages and clear content, and adds work aimed at how AI systems gather and quote sources. The goal is to be part of the answer, not just a link below it.

A knowledge graph is a database of entities and the relationships between them. Google's Knowledge Graph powers the information panels that appear beside some search results, showing facts about businesses, people and places. Being represented accurately in it helps search engines and AI tools describe your business correctly.

llms.txt is a proposed standard for a Markdown file, placed at the root of a website, that gives large language models a short, curated guide to the site's most important content. It works a bit like a sitemap written for AI tools. It's still an emerging proposal, and support varies between AI companies.

Retrieval-augmented generation is a technique where an AI system looks up relevant documents, such as web pages, before writing an answer and uses them as source material. It's how tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT search can answer with current information and cite their sources. For GEO, it means your content has to be findable and easy to quote at the moment a question is asked.

Schema markup is code added to a web page that labels its content using the shared vocabulary from Schema.org. It tells search engines that a page describes, for example, a local business, a service, a product or a set of FAQs. It's usually added as JSON-LD, the format Google recommends, and it helps search engines and AI tools interpret a page accurately.

AI share of voice is how often your business is mentioned in AI-generated answers compared with competitors, across a set of relevant questions. It's measured by asking AI assistants the questions your customers ask and recording which businesses appear. Because AI answers vary from one run to the next, it's best tracked across many questions and repeated over time.

Structured data is information organized in a standard format that machines can read without interpreting ordinary prose. On the web, the most common form is schema markup added to pages as JSON-LD. The two terms are often used interchangeably, though structured data is the broader idea.

Topical authority is the degree to which a site is seen as a reliable source on a particular subject. It's built by covering a topic thoroughly, with connected pages that answer the related questions people ask, rather than scattered one-off posts. Sites with strong topical authority are more likely to be treated as trusted sources by search engines and AI tools.

A zero-click search is one where the person gets their answer on the results page and doesn't click through to any website. Featured snippets, map results, knowledge panels and AI Overviews all contribute to it. For businesses, it means being visible on the results page and in AI answers matters, not only earning clicks.