The AI search glossary.
Every term the trade press uses, in one honest paragraph each. The acronyms live on this page so your report never needs them.
AEO · Answer Engine Optimization
The work of making your business one of the names an AI assistant gives when a customer asks a buying question. An answer holds two or three names, so this is a shortlist game, not a rankings game. The levers, in evidence order: third-party citations, reviews, pages with real numbers, machine-readable structure. Full walkthrough on What is AEO.
GEO · Generative Engine Optimization
The academic name for the same discipline, coined for engines that generate answers rather than return links. The most-cited research on what actually works, Princeton and Georgia Tech's KDD 2024 study, was published under this banner. If someone sells GEO and AEO as different services, read AEO vs GEO vs SEO first.
LLMO · Large Language Model Optimization
A third name for the same job, with the emphasis on the model itself: what an LLM already believes about you from its training data, next to what it finds when it searches. You cannot edit a model's memory, but you can change what it reads live, which is most of what moves on commercial questions.
AI Overviews
Google's AI-written answer block, shown above the classic results to roughly 1.5 billion people a month (Google, 2025). The overview answers first and the links come after, so a business can rank well and still be invisible in the part people actually read. The evidence that gets you into answers, structured data, cited sources, real figures, is the same evidence Google's overview draws on.
AI citations
The sources an assistant names or links beside its answer. This is where visibility is really decided: 82% of citations about a business point at sites the business does not own (Muck Rack, 1M+ citations), and each assistant reads its own corner of the web, with only about 11% of cited domains shared between ChatGPT and Perplexity (Profound, 100,000-prompt study). Your report lists the exact sources behind every answer you lose.
Entity optimization
Making sure the machines know exactly what you are. Software reads your business as an entity: a name with a category, a place, opening hours and an offer. When those facts are inconsistent, or exist only as prose, the entity is fuzzy and assistants hedge. Consistent details everywhere plus a structured declaration (our schema generator writes one) is the unglamorous fix.
Zero-click search
A search that ends without a click on any website, because the answer appeared directly on the results page or in the chat. For the businesses named inside the answer this is fine, the customer got their name anyway. For everyone else, no ranking helps: the visitor never arrives, and no analytics tool records the loss. That silence is why we measure the answers themselves.
Answer-ready pages
Pages written so an assistant can lift the answer whole: one real question, answered directly, with concrete figures. The KDD 2024 research measured statistics-rich pages getting cited about 41% more, while word count alone did nothing. This is why your plan includes a question page built from the questions you actually lose, not a longer About page.
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