A plain-English glossary of GEO terms
The words that come up when people talk about AI visibility, without the jargon. If a provider uses a term that is not here and cannot explain it in a sentence, that is worth noticing.
The terms worth knowing
Most of the vocabulary is borrowed from search marketing and used slightly differently. These are the ones that actually change what you would do.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| GEO | Generative engine optimisation. Work aimed at getting named in AI-written answers. |
| AEO | Answer engine optimisation. Same idea, different acronym; used interchangeably. |
| Mention rate | How often you are named across repeated asks of the same questions. The core number. |
| Citation | A source page an assistant used while writing an answer. Being cited is stronger than being mentioned. |
| Crawler | The program that fetches pages for an AI company. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and others. |
| robots.txt | A file at your domain's root telling crawlers what they may fetch. Can block AI crawlers entirely. |
| Structured data / schema | Machine-readable facts in your page's code stating what the business is and where. |
| JSON-LD | The format that structured data is usually written in. A block of code in the page's head. |
| LocalBusiness | The schema type describing a physical local business. Has more specific subtypes for most trades. |
| NAP | Name, address, phone. Keeping them identical everywhere matters more than it sounds. |
| Retrieval / RAG | The assistant searching and reading pages before answering, rather than relying on memory. |
| Passage | The chunk of a page a model actually lifts. Why page structure matters as much as page content. |
| Confidence interval | The honest range around a measured rate. Wide on small samples. |
| Server-side rendering | Sending finished HTML rather than building the page with JavaScript. AI crawlers need it. |
| llms.txt | A proposed summary file at your domain root. Cheap to add; no major assistant has been shown to read it. |
Common questions
Is GEO the same as AEO?
In practice yes. Different people picked different acronyms for the same work; neither has won.
What is an 'AI visibility score'?
A vendor-specific composite, usually blending platforms and hiding uncertainty. Ask what goes into it and what the margin of error is.
If this answered one question, these answer the next ones.
What is generative engine optimisation?
Generative engine optimisation is the work of getting a business named in the answers AI assistants write. Where search returns a page of links to choose from, an assistant writes a paragraph and names a handful of businesses in it. GEO is about being one of them.
GEO vs SEO: what actually differs?
SEO competes for a position on a page of links. GEO competes to be quoted inside a written answer. They share the groundwork -- a readable, well-structured site -- and diverge on what is measured, which sources matter, and what counts as winning.