- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
- Optimising your content and data so AI assistants cite you when answering buying questions.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
- Used interchangeably with AEO; emphasises generated answers rather than link lists.
- LLM (Large Language Model)
- The model generating the answer — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and similar systems.
- Answer engine
- Any interface that returns a synthesised answer instead of a list of results, including AI chatbots and AI Overviews.
- Retrieval
- The step where the system fetches candidate documents from the web or an index before writing an answer.
- RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
- Generating an answer grounded in retrieved documents rather than model memory alone.
- Grounding
- Tying an answer to specific sources so claims can be attributed and checked.
- Citation
- A named source or link the model attaches to a claim. Being cited is the goal of AEO.
- Citation share
- Your share of all brand citations across a fixed set of buyer prompts. The core AEO KPI.
- Presence rate
- The percentage of tracked prompts where your brand appears at all.
- Share of voice
- How often you're mentioned relative to named competitors in AI answers.
- Mention position
- Where you appear in an answer — first named options carry far more weight.
- Prompt panel
- A fixed set of buyer prompts re-run on a schedule so visibility change is measurable.
- Entity
- How the model understands your company as a thing: name, category, features, relationships.
- Entity consistency
- Describing your product identically across your site, directories and third-party sources so models trust the description.
- Structured data / schema
- Machine-readable markup labelling what a page contains, making facts easier to extract.
- Extractability
- How easily a machine can lift a clear, quotable fact from your page.
- Hallucination
- A confident but incorrect model claim — often caused by missing or conflicting source data.
- Training data vs live retrieval
- Some answers come from what the model learned in training, others from a live web fetch. AEO targets both.
- AI Overviews
- Google's generated summary above traditional results — a major source of zero-click research.
- Zero-click research
- Buyers getting their answer without visiting any vendor website.
- Comparison / alternatives page
- Content directly answering 'A vs B' or 'alternatives to X' prompts — the highest-leverage AEO asset.