Reference

The AEO & SEO glossary.

Plain-English definitions of every term that matters in Answer Engine Optimization. Updated as the discipline evolves.

A web crawler operated by an AI company to gather content for training or for live answer-engine retrieval. Distinct from traditional search crawlers like Googlebot.

AI Drift Monitoring

Continuous tracking of changes in how AI engines describe your brand — new misstatements, lost citations, sentiment shifts — with alerts when something material changes.

AI Share of Voice

Your brand's percentage of total citations across AI answer engines for a defined set of prompts in a category — the AEO equivalent of share of voice in advertising.

AI Visibility Score

A 0-100 metric measuring how often and how favorably your brand is mentioned across major AI answer engines for a tracked set of buyer-intent prompts.

An AI system that responds to natural-language queries with a synthesized answer rather than a list of links — examples include ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Anthropic Claude.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)

The practice of optimizing content, schema, and brand signals so that AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini cite your brand accurately when answering user queries.

Schema.org markup that identifies the human author of a piece of content, including their name, credentials, and link to a profile.

An HTML element (<code><link rel="canonical"></code>) that tells search engines which version of a URL is the authoritative one when duplicate or near-duplicate content exists.

A reference to your brand or website inside an AI-generated answer. Cited brands receive both visibility and (often) a direct link, similar to a SERP position 1 result.

Content Cluster

A group of interlinked pages on the same topic, organized around a central pillar page that links out to and is linked from supporting subtopic pages.

E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)

Google's framework for evaluating content quality. AI engines now use similar signals to decide which sources to cite.

A distinct, identifiable thing — a person, organization, product, place, or concept. Search and AI systems index the world as a graph of entities and their relationships.

A specific type of Schema.org markup that labels question-and-answer content so search engines and AI systems can extract Q&A pairs verbatim into their results.

When an AI system generates a factually incorrect statement with high confidence — for example, attributing a feature to your brand that does not exist, or confusing your brand with a competitor.

Internal Linking

The practice of linking pages within your own website to one another, which distributes link equity and helps search engines and AI systems understand site structure.

Knowledge Graph

A structured database of entities (people, places, organizations, concepts) and the relationships between them. Google's Knowledge Graph powers the right-hand panel in search results.

A plain-text file at the root of a domain (like /robots.txt) that gives AI systems a curated, machine-readable summary of your brand, products, and key documentation links.

Meta Description

A short HTML meta tag (typically 150-160 characters) that summarizes a page. Search engines and AI systems use it as the snippet under the page title in results.

Open Graph (OG)

A meta-tag protocol that controls how a URL is rendered when shared on Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, etc. AI engines also read OG tags to extract page titles, descriptions, and preview images.

A long, comprehensive page that covers a broad topic at the center of a content cluster — designed to rank for a high-volume head term and feed link equity to subtopic pages.

Prompt Engineering

The practice of crafting input prompts to elicit specific behaviors from large language models. In an AEO context, the prompts you optimize for are the ones your buyers actually ask AI engines.

RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)

An AI architecture that combines a language model with a real-time search step — the model retrieves fresh documents at query time and uses them as context to generate the answer.

Enhanced Google search listings (FAQ accordions, recipe cards, review stars) generated when valid schema markup is present on a page.

A plain-text file at /robots.txt that tells web crawlers (search engines and AI bots) which pages they may access. Mis-configuring it is the #1 way brands accidentally block themselves from AI engines.

Standardized JSON-LD or microdata embedded in HTML that tells search engines and AI systems the meaning of page content (e.g., this is a product, this is a FAQ, this is a person).

An XML file at the root of a domain that lists every URL you want crawlers to index, with optional metadata like last modification date and change frequency.

Structured Data

Any standardized format (JSON-LD, microdata, RDFa) that adds machine-readable meaning to web content. Schema.org is the most widely adopted vocabulary.

The set of website infrastructure best practices — site speed, mobile-friendliness, indexability, schema, internal linking — that enable search engines and AI systems to crawl and understand a site.

Topical Authority

The depth and breadth of a website's coverage on a single topic, measured by search engines and AI systems through internal linking, content volume, and citation patterns.

The open knowledge base behind Wikipedia. AI training data weights Wikidata heavily, making a Wikidata entry one of the highest-leverage AEO investments.

Run your free AI visibility audit

See how often ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini cite your brand — and exactly which glossary terms apply to your gaps.

Start Free Trial → See the product