AI & SEO Glossary

Definitions

Generative Engine Optimization(GEO)

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of structuring a website so AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews cite it when answering questions. Unlike traditional SEO, which competes for a ranked position on a results page, GEO competes to be the source an AI quotes inside its answer.GEO overlaps heavily with SEO — an AI system can only cite pages it can crawl, parse, and trust — but it adds requirements traditional ranking never had: answer-first page structure, explicit question-and-answer blocks, concrete statistics rather than vague claims, and crawler access for AI user agents such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot.

Answer Engine Optimization(AEO)

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of writing content so that individual passages — not whole pages — can be retrieved and quoted as direct answers. The unit of competition is the snippet: a self-contained block that makes sense when lifted away from the page around it.AEO matters because some AI search systems retrieve at the sub-document level. Rather than fetching a handful of ranked pages and summarizing them, these systems break pages into small chunks, embed each one, and pull the most relevant chunks directly into the model's context window. A page that only makes sense read top to bottom supplies poor chunks, however well it ranks.

Search Engine Optimization(SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of making a website rank higher in search results like Google and Bing. It covers technical health (speed, crawlability, mobile rendering), content that matches what people actually search for, and authority signals such as links from other reputable sites.

Local SEO

Local SEO is the practice of getting a business found in location-based searches — "near me" queries, Google Maps, and the three-business local pack at the top of local results. It depends more on a complete Google Business Profile, consistent contact details across the web, and steady reviews than on the website itself.

Google Business Profile(GBP)

A Google Business Profile is the free listing that puts a business on Google Maps and in the local pack. It carries the name, address, phone number, hours, photos, and reviews Google shows before a searcher ever reaches a website, which makes it the front door for local search.

Google AI Overviews

Google AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that appear above the traditional blue links on Google. They answer the question directly and cite a small number of sources, which means a site can lose clicks to an overview it is not cited in even while ranking well below it.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation(RAG)

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a technique that lets an AI model answer using your own documents. Before answering, the system searches a private collection of content, pulls the most relevant passages, and hands them to the model — so answers cite real source material instead of relying on what the model memorized during training.RAG is what makes an AI assistant useful over a company knowledge base, support archive, or product catalog. It also bounds the accuracy problem: because the model answers from retrieved text rather than memory, wrong answers usually trace to a retrieval failure you can inspect and fix.

Large Language Model(LLM)

A Large Language Model (LLM) is an AI system trained on very large amounts of text to predict and generate language. It powers tools like ChatGPT and Claude, and can write, summarize, classify, and answer questions without being programmed for each task individually.

AI Agent

An AI agent is a program that uses a language model to carry out multi-step tasks on its own — deciding what to do next, calling tools or APIs, and checking its own results. The difference from a chatbot is action: a chatbot answers, an agent completes the work.

Structured Data

Structured data is machine-readable markup added to a web page — usually JSON-LD — that states plainly what the page is about: a business, an article, a product, a list of questions and answers. Search engines and AI systems use it to understand a page without having to infer meaning from the layout.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are Google's three measurements of real-world page experience: how fast the main content loads, how quickly the page responds to input, and how much the layout shifts while loading. They are a confirmed ranking signal and are measured from actual visitors, not lab tests.

llms.txt

llms.txt is a plain-text file at the root of a website that summarizes what the site offers and links to its most important pages, written for AI systems rather than human visitors. It is a proposed convention, not an official standard, and works alongside robots.txt rather than replacing it.