Quick answer: this glossary defines the 26 terms you'll actually encounter when learning how AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI find and recommend businesses — in plain English, with each term tagged honestly: Established (proven, act on it), Emerging (real but young, watch it), or Mostly Hype (skip it, and we say why). The tags matter because this field is two years old and full of confident-sounding jargon selling uncertain things. Bookmark this page; we update it quarterly.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
Established (as a term). The practice of optimizing content to appear in AI-generated answers. Functionally the same thing as GEO — different communities coined different acronyms for the same work. If you see AEO, GEO, or "AI visibility," assume they mean the same discipline.
Agentic commerce
Emerging. The next phase after AI recommendations: AI agents that don't just suggest businesses but transact with them — browsing, booking, and buying on a user's behalf. Payment and checkout protocols from major platforms emerged through 2025–26, but consumer adoption is early. Worth watching, not yet worth re-architecting your site for.
AI crawler
Established. A bot an AI company uses to read websites, the way Googlebot reads them for search. Each company runs its own: GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot (Perplexity), Google-Extended (Google's AI training). Your site can allow or block each one individually — and many sites block them without their owners knowing. Full article: Is your website visible to ChatGPT?
AI Overviews
Established. The AI-generated summary Google shows above traditional search results for many queries. Sources cited in AI Overviews draw heavily from pages that already rank well in normal Google search — meaning your traditional SEO substantially feeds this surface.
AI Mode
Established. Google's fuller conversational search experience (a step beyond AI Overviews), which answers questions through dialogue and runs aggressive query fan-out behind the scenes. See query fan-out.
Citation
Established. When an AI answer links to or names a specific source for a claim — the AI-era equivalent of ranking. Citations are the measurable win in AI visibility: they're how a reader discovers your business from inside an answer. Compare mention.
ClaudeBot
Established. Anthropic's web crawler, which gathers content that informs Claude. One of the user-agents to check in your robots.txt — our crawler library documents each one. Full article: Is your website visible to ChatGPT?
Crawl-to-referral ratio
Emerging. How many times AI crawlers read your site versus how many human visitors AI systems send back. Published CDN data shows crawls vastly outnumber referred clicks — useful context for deciding how much AI traffic to expect, and a reason the "visibility" benefit of AI is partly brand exposure rather than clicks.
Entity
Established. What AI and search systems understand your business to be — its name, category, location, and how confidently the system can classify it. Inconsistent descriptions across the web create a blurry entity, and blurry entities don't get recommended. The fix is unglamorous consistency: same name, same category description, everywhere.
Extractability
Established. How easily an AI can lift a usable, self-contained answer from your page. Answer-first openings, question-shaped headings, short standalone passages, and tables all raise it. The single most within-your-control factor in AI visibility. Full article: The GEO writing checklist
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
Established (as a term). The umbrella practice of improving how often and how favorably AI systems mention, cite, or recommend your business. Coined in a 2023 Princeton research paper. Not to be confused with "geo" as in geographic targeting — an entirely different, older marketing term. Full article: SEO vs GEO
GPTBot
Established. OpenAI's main web crawler. Blocking it in robots.txt (or via CDN settings) cuts your site off from the systems behind ChatGPT — one of the most common critical findings in our audits, and often switched on by a CDN default the owner never chose. Full article: Should you block AI crawlers?
Grounding
Established. When an AI system bases its answer on retrieved, current sources (with citations) rather than only on what it memorized in training. Grounded answers are why fresh, extractable content can win citations quickly — the AI is actively looking for sources at answer time.
Hallucination
Established. When an AI states something false with confidence. Relevant to businesses because AI systems can describe you inaccurately; the practical defense is consistent, clear information about your business everywhere the AI might learn from. Checking what AI says about you should be routine, like Googling yourself.
llms.txt
Emerging, contested. A proposed standard: a markdown file at your site root giving AI systems a curated index of your key content. Cheap to add, no downside — but Google has said on the record it ignores the file, and no major engine has committed to honoring it. A 20-minute lottery ticket, not a strategy. Full article: llms.txt — an honest verdict
Mention
Established. When your brand is named anywhere — in an AI answer or on any webpage — with or without a link. AI systems learn about brands from mentions across the whole web, which is why a Reddit thread or a "best of" listicle that names you (no link needed) still builds your AI visibility. The AI-era loosening of the old backlink obsession.
MCP (Model Context Protocol)
Emerging. A technical standard letting AI assistants connect directly to tools and data sources. For software companies, "being a tool the AI can call" is a real distribution strategy; for typical small businesses, it's not yet relevant. Watch, don't build.
Non-determinism
Established. The same question asked twice produces different AI answers. Run any category prompt through the same engine a few times and compare the brand lists — they rarely match exactly, which you can verify yourself in minutes. The single most important measurement fact in this field: it's why any tool selling you a fixed "AI rank" is selling snake oil, and why honest measurement means percentages across many samples. See share of voice.
PerplexityBot
Established. Perplexity's crawler, feeding its own search index. Perplexity is the most retrieval-driven major engine — it can cite a page published days ago — making it the fastest feedback loop for new content.
Prompt panel
Emerging (as standard practice). A fixed set of realistic customer questions ("best [category] in [city]," "alternatives to [competitor]") run repeatedly across AI engines to measure whether and how your business appears. The AI-era equivalent of rank tracking — with repeated sampling required because of non-determinism.
Query fan-out
Established (behavior); Emerging (optimization practice). When an AI system silently breaks one question into many sub-queries, searches them all, and assembles the answer from whichever sources best answer each piece. The practical upshot: cover the cluster of sub-questions around your topic, not just the head keyword. Full article: Query fan-out, explained simply
Retrieval
Established. The step where an AI system fetches relevant content from an index before writing its answer. Different engines retrieve from different indexes (ChatGPT leans on Bing's, Gemini on Google's, Perplexity on its own) — which is why fixing your Bing presence can fix your ChatGPT visibility, a connection most tools miss.
Schema (structured data)
Established. Machine-readable labels (usually JSON-LD) describing what a page contains — a product, a FAQ, a local business. The closest thing to a shared language between your site and both search and AI systems. FAQ and HowTo schema matter most for AI visibility because they package content in the question-answer shape AI extracts from.
Share of voice
Established (metric); measurement quality varies wildly. The percentage of AI answers in your category that mention you versus competitors, measured across a prompt panel over time. The honest headline metric of AI visibility — as a sampled percentage with a margin of error, never a precise rank. Tools that report it from single runs are reporting noise.
Vector/embedding optimization
Mostly Hype. Paid services claiming to tune your content for AI systems' internal semantic representations. No engine exposes its embedding space, the claims are unfalsifiable, and the legitimate part (write clearly about one topic per passage) is just good extractability wearing a lab coat. Save your money.
Visibility score
Emerging; read the methodology. A single number summarizing how findable your business is to AI systems. Useful as a tracked trend, misleading as an absolute — the number is only as honest as the methodology behind it (sampling, engines covered, what's weighted). Any score without a published methodology is marketing.
How to use this glossary
If you're new: read AI crawler, extractability, mention, and non-determinism first — those four concepts are 80% of the practical picture. If you're evaluating tools or agencies: the tags are your filter — anyone selling certainty on an Emerging term, or anything at all on a Mostly Hype term, has told you what you need to know. For deeper definitions of the search-engine fundamentals behind these, our site glossary goes term by term.
And if you want the applied version: SeeGeo's free audit checks your site against the Established items on this list — crawler access, extractability, schema, entity clarity — in about 30 seconds, free, no signup for your score.
Last updated: August 2026. This field moves fast; we revise tags and add terms quarterly. Spotted a term we should add? Tell us at info@see-geo.com.