Reference
AI visibility glossary
Plain-English definitions of the terms behind AI visibility and generative engine optimization. No jargon for its own sake.
- Generative engine optimization (GEO)
- The work of getting your business named and cited by AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews when someone asks about your industry.
- Answer engine optimization (AEO)
- Another name for the same goal as GEO: becoming the answer an AI or search engine hands back, rather than just a link in a list.
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- The work of ranking high in a list of search results so people click your link. GEO builds on top of SEO for the world of AI answers.
- AI Overviews
- Google's AI-written answer that appears above the classic list of links, citing a handful of sources rather than listing ten.
- Answer engine
- Any system that returns a direct answer instead of a list of links, including ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, and voice assistants.
- llms.txt
- A plain-text file at the root of a website that gives AI tools a clean source of truth about the business: who it is, what it sells, pricing, location, and key facts.
- Structured data (schema)
- Machine-readable markup (JSON-LD) in a page that tells search and AI exactly what the page is about, such as the business, its services, and its FAQs.
- AI crawler
- A bot that reads the web for an AI company, such as GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended. A site can allow or block them in robots.txt.
- Citation
- When an AI answer names or links a source. Getting cited is the goal of GEO: it is how your business shows up inside an AI response.
- Zero-click search
- A search that is answered on the results page or inside an AI response, so the person never clicks through to a website. It is why being named in the answer matters.
- Markdown mirror
- A plain-text version of a web page, served so AI crawlers can read the content cleanly without navigation, ads, or other page chrome.
- Discovery Protocol
- Altaway's ten-rule standard for making a site readable to AI and trusted by search. The same audit Altaway runs on client sites, and on its own.
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