The AI Search & GEO Glossary

AI Bot Blocking

Using robots.txt and server rules to stop AI crawlers from accessing your site.

AI Brand Mention

Any reference to a brand inside an AI answer, whether or not it is linked.

AI Content Detection

Software that guesses whether text was written by a human or an AI model.

AI Crawler

A bot that fetches pages to train or feed AI, not to build a search index.

AI Overviews

Google's AI-generated answer box at the top of search results.

AI Search

Search where an AI reads sources and writes one answer instead of listing links.

AI Visibility

How present a brand is across AI answers — mentions and citations, not rankings.

AI Visibility Rate

The share of applicable buyer queries where an AI engine names or cites you.

Answer Engine Optimization(AEO)

Structuring content so answer engines can return your answer directly.

Answer-First Writing

Leading a section with the direct answer, then justifying it, so machines can lift it.

CCBot (Common Crawl)

Common Crawl's web crawler, whose public dataset trains many language models.

Chunk Retrieval

Fetching the top few most relevant text passages from a vector index for a query.

Chunking

Splitting a document into small passages an AI can retrieve and quote one at a time.

Citation (AI)

When an AI answer attributes or links a specific page as its source.

Citation Readiness

How ready a page is to be quoted and attributed inside an AI answer.

Citation Share

Your slice of all the citations AI answers hand out for a topic.

ClaudeBot

Anthropic's web crawler that collects public content for Claude.

Co-occurrence

How often two terms appear together in text, used to infer how related they are.

Conversational Search

Searching through a natural-language, multi-turn dialogue that carries context.

Cosine Similarity

A score from -1 to 1 measuring how closely two vectors point in the same direction.

Entity

A uniquely identifiable real-world thing an engine recognises, distinct from its name.

Entity Density

How richly a page covers the named entities a topic requires — not keyword repetition.

Entity Home

The single web page an engine treats as the authoritative source of an entity's identity.

Entity Optimization

Making a brand or topic unambiguously recognizable to engines as a distinct entity.

Entity Salience

A score for how central an entity is to a document as a whole.

Extractability

Whether a passage can be lifted into an AI answer and still stand on its own.

Fact Density

How many specific, sourced facts a passage packs per sentence.

Featured Snippet

Google's boxed answer at the top of results, lifted verbatim from one ranking page.

Generative Engine Optimization(GEO)

Optimizing to be cited inside AI-generated answers, not ranked in blue links.

Google AI Mode

Google's dedicated conversational AI search tab, distinct from the inline AI Overview.

Google-Extended

A robots.txt token that controls whether Google may train Gemini on your content.

GPTBot

OpenAI's crawler that gathers web content to train its models.

Grounding

Constraining an AI's answer to retrieved source documents instead of model memory.

Grounding Source

The specific document an AI cites as evidence for a claim in its answer.

Hallucination

A confident AI statement that is factually wrong, unsupported, or invented.

Knowledge Graph

Google's structured database of real-world entities and the facts that connect them.

Knowledge Panel

The information box Google shows for an entity it recognises in its Knowledge Graph.

LLM SERP

The set of sources an AI answer cites — the generative stand-in for a results page.

llms.txt

A proposed file that points AI models to the content you want them to read.

Machine-Readable Content

Content encoded so software can parse its meaning, not just display its text.

Multimodal Search

Searching with more than one input type at once — such as an image plus text.

Named Entity Recognition(NER)

The NLP task of finding entities in text and tagging each with its type.

OAI-SearchBot

OpenAI's crawler that indexes pages so they can be cited in ChatGPT search.

Passage Embedding

A numeric vector that captures a passage's meaning so similar passages sit near each other.

People Also Ask(PAA)

Google's expandable cluster of related questions, each answered by a quoted page.

PerplexityBot

Perplexity's crawler that surfaces and links websites in its answer engine.

Position Zero

The informal name for the featured snippet that sits above the #1 organic result.

Prompt Injection (SEO)

Hiding instructions in page content to try to manipulate what an AI answer says.

Prompt Visibility Tracking

Repeatedly querying AI engines with a fixed prompt set to measure how often your brand appears.

Query Fan-Out

One query becomes many: the engine splits your question, searches in parallel, and merges one answer.

Query Synthesis

An AI system generating new machine-written queries from your one prompt.

Quotable Sentence

A self-contained statement an AI can lift verbatim into an answer and attribute.

Retrieval Corpus

The full body of documents a retrieval system searches to answer a query.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation(RAG)

Fetch relevant documents first, then have an LLM write an answer grounded in them.

Search Generative Experience(SGE)

Google's 2023 experimental AI search interface that became AI Overviews.

Selection Rate

How often an AI cites your page once it's already in the retrieved set.

Semantic SEO

Optimizing around topics, meaning and entities rather than individual keywords.

Semantic Similarity

How close two pieces of text are in meaning, measured by comparing their embeddings.

Semantic Triple

The atomic unit of linked data: one fact as subject, predicate, object.

Share of Voice (AI)(AI SOV)

Your slice of AI-answer visibility for a topic, measured against competitors.

Structured Answer Block

A self-contained passage formatted so an engine can lift it whole as a direct answer.

The ANSWER Framework

AnswerManiac's six-stage method for building AI visibility: Audit, Navigate, Structure, Write, Earn, Refine.

Vector Embedding

A list of numbers that encodes meaning so related content sits close in vector space.

Zero-Click Search

A search that ends on the results page, with no click to any website.