The AEO Glossary
This glossary is for marketing leads, founders, and content or SEO teams evaluating or already running an AEO program. Every definition is self-contained and terms are listed alphabetically.
A
AI Crawler
An automated bot an AI company operates to fetch web pages, either to train a model (GPTBot, Google-Extended) or retrieve fresh content at answer time (OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot). Controlled by robots.txt and any WAF rules in front of it, checked as part of our technical foundation audit.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
The practice of structuring a website and off-site presence so AI answer engines can find, understand, and cite it when responding to a buyer's question. Shares technical ground with SEO but optimizes for being quoted inside a generated answer, the work our AEO service covers end to end.
C
Citation Rate
The percentage of prompts, within a tracked prompt set, for which an AI engine cites or links to a domain in its answer. The core AEO measurement metric, tracked per engine and over time, reported in how we measure AEO.
Chunking
Splitting a long document into smaller passages before indexing, so a retrieval system can pull back the most relevant few paragraphs rather than an entire page.
E, F, G
Entity
A specific, uniquely identifiable thing (a company, person, product) that an AI or search engine treats as a discrete node rather than a plain string of text. Consistent naming and details everywhere is a prerequisite for engines to correctly associate citations with the right business.
FAQPage Schema
A schema.org structured data type marking question-and-answer content so engines can parse it. Must mirror the visible FAQ text word for word, a check we run as part of our structured data work.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
A near-synonym for AEO, referring to optimizing content so generative AI systems surface and cite it. In practice the same audit and content work serves both.
K, L
Knowledge Graph
A structured database of entities and verified relationships that search and AI systems draw on to answer factual questions with confidence.
llms.txt
A proposed, community-driven standard consisting of a plain Markdown file at a site's root that gives large language models a curated index of its most important pages. Carries no confirmed ranking weight today but is a low-cost item in the technical AEO work we run for every account.
Linkable Asset
A page or tool built to earn other sites' links and mentions because it solves a real problem for its audience, such as a calculator or an original research report.
R, S
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
The architecture behind most AI answer engines: a system retrieves relevant documents, then feeds them to a language model alongside the question so the answer is grounded in retrieved text.
Share of Voice (SoV)
The percentage of answers, across a tracked prompt set and engine, in which your brand appears relative to competitors. The headline number in how we measure and report AEO progress.
Structured Data / Schema Markup
Machine-readable code, usually JSON-LD, telling engines explicitly what a piece of content is rather than leaving them to infer it, one of the highest-leverage items in the technical AEO audit.
Tracked Prompt Set
The fixed list of real buyer questions an AEO engagement measures share of voice against on a recurring basis, scoped as part of our pricing.
Z
Zero-Click Search
A search where the user gets their answer directly from a featured snippet, AI Overview, or assistant response, without clicking through. AEO treats being the cited, quoted source inside the answer as the real win.