--- title: "The GEO glossary: AI visibility, defined term by term" description: "Every term you'll meet in AI visibility work — GEO, grounding, AI citations, share of voice — each with a liftable definition and the 'so what'." canonical: https://see-geo.com/glossary language: en updated: 2026-09-08 publisher: SeeGeo alternates: fr: https://see-geo.com/fr/glossary de: https://see-geo.com/de/glossary --- # The GEO glossary: AI visibility, defined term by term Every term you'll meet in AI visibility work — GEO, grounding, AI citations, share of voice — each with a liftable definition and the 'so what'. ## Pages - [What is Query fan-out?](https://see-geo.com/glossary/query-fan-out) — Query fan-out: how AI search splits one question into sub-queries and merges the sources. Which pages get cited, and how to write for it. - [What is llms.txt?](https://see-geo.com/glossary/llms-txt) — llms.txt explained: what the file is, who proposed it, whether ChatGPT, Claude or Google read it, and whether it is worth adding to your site in 2026. - [What is AI visibility audit?](https://see-geo.com/glossary/ai-visibility-audit) — AI visibility audit, defined: the six things it measures, how it differs from an SEO audit, what a score means and how to run one free in about 20 seconds. - [What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?](https://see-geo.com/glossary/generative-engine-optimization) — GEO means optimizing your site so AI assistants can read, quote, and recommend it. How it differs from SEO, and what actually moves it. - [What is AI visibility?](https://see-geo.com/glossary/ai-visibility) — AI visibility is how often AI assistants mention or recommend you. What it's made of, why it differs from rankings, and how to measure it honestly. - [What is Answer engine?](https://see-geo.com/glossary/answer-engine) — An answer engine replies with a synthesized answer, not links. Why that changes visibility, and what it reads to build its answers. - [What is AI crawler?](https://see-geo.com/glossary/ai-crawler) — AI crawlers read your site for AI training, AI search, or live answers. The three kinds, why most don't run JavaScript, and how access decides visibility. - [What is Google AI Overviews?](https://see-geo.com/glossary/ai-overviews) — Google's AI Overviews sit above search results and run on Googlebot's index. What decides inclusion, and what blocking Google-Extended does and doesn't do. - [What is Grounding?](https://see-geo.com/glossary/grounding) — Grounding is an AI answering from live retrieved pages instead of memory. Why it's rarer than assumed, and why that decides how citations work. - [What is AI citation?](https://see-geo.com/glossary/ai-citation) — An AI citation is a source credit inside a generated answer. Why cited pages are mostly third-party, and what earns a citation for your own pages. - [What is Share of voice (AI)?](https://see-geo.com/glossary/share-of-voice) — AI share of voice: how often answers name you vs competitors across repeated sampling. Why it beats any single 'AI rank', and how to measure it. - [What is Prompt panel?](https://see-geo.com/glossary/prompt-panel) — A prompt panel is the fixed question set behind honest AI-visibility tracking. What a good panel contains and why it must stay stable. - [What is Content extractability?](https://see-geo.com/glossary/content-extractability) — Extractability is whether AI can lift a self-contained answer from your page. The measured levers: answer-first leads, question headings, stats, dates. - [What is Entity clarity?](https://see-geo.com/glossary/entity-clarity) — Entity clarity: whether machines can tell what your business is. Why visible prose must match your structured data, and which pages anchor identity. - [What is Structured data (Schema.org)?](https://see-geo.com/glossary/structured-data) — Structured data (JSON-LD) tells machines what your pages are. Which types matter for AI visibility, and the one rule: never mark up what isn't visible. - [What is robots.txt?](https://see-geo.com/glossary/robots-txt) — robots.txt controls which crawlers may read your site — now including every AI crawler. The syntax, the accidents, and what it can't control. - [What is LLM training data?](https://see-geo.com/glossary/llm-training-data) — Training data decides what AI models know about you from memory. How the web gets in, the years-long lag, and the block-or-allow trade-off. - [What is E-E-A-T?](https://see-geo.com/glossary/e-e-a-t) — E-E-A-T is the trust checklist search raters use — and AI answers increasingly mirror. The signals that are checkable by machine, and the ones that aren't. - [What is Answer-first content?](https://see-geo.com/glossary/answer-first-content) — Answer-first content puts the full answer in the first two paragraphs. Why inverted structure wins AI citations, and how to retrofit existing pages.