Glossary
GEO and SEO terms, defined
Plain-English definitions of Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), AI visibility, share of voice, AI crawlers, llms.txt, structured data and classic SEO terms.
A
- AI Mode
- AI Mode is Google's fully conversational search experience, in which the whole results page is replaced by a generated answer with follow-up questions.
- AI Overviews
- AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries Google shows above organic results for some queries, built from pages in its index and linked as sources.
- AI visibility
- AI visibility is the share of AI assistant answers to relevant prompts in which your brand is mentioned.
C
- canonical
- A canonical tag tells search engines and crawlers which URL is the preferred version of a page when the same content is reachable at several addresses.
- citation
- A citation is a source link that an AI assistant attaches to its answer to show where a claim came from.
- ClaudeBot
- ClaudeBot is Anthropic's web crawler used to gather public pages for training Claude models; Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User handle retrieval and on-demand fetches.
- Core Web Vitals
- Core Web Vitals are Google's three user-experience metrics (LCP, INP and CLS) that measure loading speed, responsiveness and visual stability of a page.
- crawl budget
- Crawl budget is the number of pages a crawler is willing and able to fetch from a site in a given period, set by server capacity and perceived value.
F
- fact card
- A fact card is the verified set of facts about a brand (prices, address, phone, hours, key product details) that Seoptist compares against AI answers to detect inaccuracies.
G
- GEO
- Generative Engine Optimisation is the practice of making a brand more likely to be found, understood and recommended by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.
- Google-Extended
- Google-Extended is a robots.txt control token that lets site owners opt out of their content being used to train Gemini models without affecting Google Search or AI Overviews.
- GPTBot
- GPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler that collects content for training its models; it is distinct from OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User.
- grounding
- Grounding is the process by which an AI model bases its answer on retrieved, current sources rather than on training data alone.
H
- hallucination
- A hallucination is a confident but false statement produced by an AI model, such as a wrong price, address or service attributed to a business.
I
- INP
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is the Core Web Vital that measures how long a page takes to visually respond after a user taps, clicks or presses a key.
L
- llms.txt
- llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file at a site's root that gives AI systems a short, curated description of the site and links to its most important pages.
N
- NAP consistency
- NAP consistency means a business's name, address and phone number are identical across its website, structured data, Google Business Profile and third-party directories.
O
- OAI-SearchBot
- OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's crawler for indexing pages that ChatGPT can surface and cite in search-enabled answers, separate from GPTBot's training role.
P
- PerplexityBot
- PerplexityBot is the crawler Perplexity uses to index pages for its answer engine; Perplexity-User fetches pages on demand during a conversation.
- prompt set
- A prompt set is the list of realistic customer questions a brand tracks across AI engines to measure visibility and share of voice.
R
- RAG
- Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is the architecture in which a system retrieves relevant documents and passes them to a language model to write a grounded answer.
S
- sentiment score
- Sentiment score is a value from -1 to 1 describing how positively or negatively an AI answer talks about a brand when it mentions it.
- share of voice
- Share of voice in AI answers is the proportion of brand mentions across a prompt set that belong to you rather than to your tracked competitors.
- structured data
- Structured data is machine-readable markup, usually JSON-LD using schema.org vocabulary, that states facts about a page or business explicitly for search engines and AI systems.
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