The GEO Glossary: 50 Terms You Need to Know

AI Citation

When an AI assistant references your business or content in a response. The GEO equivalent of a search ranking.

AI Crawler

Bots that AI companies use to gather training data. Examples: GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic).

AI Overviews

Google's feature that shows AI-generated summaries at the top of search results.

Answer Engine

A search tool designed to give direct answers rather than links. Perplexity is a pure answer engine.

Authority Signals

Indicators that tell AI your business is trustworthy and credible. Includes reviews, press coverage, and citations from reputable sources.

BERT

Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. Google's AI that helps understand search queries. Predecessor to current LLMs.

Brand Mention

Any reference to your business name, with or without a link. Valuable for GEO even without backlinks.

Browse Mode

When AI assistants search the web in real-time rather than relying only on training data. ChatGPT and Claude can do this optionally.

Citation Building

The practice of getting your business mentioned on authoritative sites that AI relies on for information.

Conversational Search

When users search by asking questions naturally, as in conversation. "Where should I eat tonight?" vs. "restaurants near me."

Context Window

The amount of text an AI can process at once. Larger windows mean AI can consider more information when generating responses.

Data Freshness

How recent the information AI has access to is. Training data has cutoffs; search-augmented AI is more current.

Direct Answer

When AI provides a specific answer rather than a list of sources. The goal of many user queries.

Entity Recognition

AI's ability to identify specific businesses, people, or places. Clear, consistent information helps AI recognize your entity.

E-E-A-T

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. Google's quality guidelines that also influence AI recommendations.

Featured Response

When your business is the primary recommendation in an AI answer, rather than one of several options.

Foundation Model

The base AI models (GPT-4, Claude, etc.) that power AI assistants. Trained on massive datasets.

Generative AI

AI that creates new content (text, images, etc.) rather than just analyzing existing content.

Generative Engine

An AI system that generates answers to queries. ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity are generative engines.

GEO Audit

An assessment of how a business currently appears (or doesn't) in AI responses for relevant queries.

Grounding

When AI connects its responses to specific, verifiable sources. Reduces hallucination.

Inference

When AI processes a query and generates a response. Each question you ask triggers inference.

Information Retrieval

The process of finding relevant information from a large dataset. Traditional search is information retrieval.

Knowledge Cutoff

The date after which an AI model has no training data. Information after this date isn't in the model's memory.

Knowledge Graph

A database of entities and relationships. Google's Knowledge Graph powers many search features.

Local Pack

Google's box showing local business results. Often appears alongside AI Overviews.

llms.txt

A proposed standard file (like robots.txt) to provide information to AI crawlers about your site.

Mention Monitoring

Tracking when and where your business is mentioned online, especially in contexts AI might learn from.

Multi-modal

AI that processes multiple types of input (text, images, audio). Relevant as visual search grows.

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

AI's ability to understand and generate human language.

Optimization

The process of improving something for a specific outcome. GEO optimizes for AI recommendations.

Prompt

The input/question given to an AI. Understanding how users prompt AI helps with GEO strategy.

Query Intent

What the user actually wants when they ask a question. AI tries to match responses to intent.

Ranking Factors

Signals that influence where/whether you appear. Different for SEO vs. GEO.

Recommendation Query

Questions asking AI to suggest options. "What's the best..." or "Where should I..." are recommendation queries.

robots.txt

File that tells crawlers what to access. Now relevant for AI crawlers too.

Schema Markup

Structured data code that helps search engines and AI understand page content.

Sentiment

Whether mentions of your business are positive, negative, or neutral. Influences AI recommendations.

Source Authority

How trustworthy AI considers a particular website or publication.

Structured Data

Information formatted in a standard way that machines can easily read.

Token

The unit AI uses to process text. Roughly 3/4 of a word on average.

Training Cutoff

Same as Knowledge Cutoff. The date beyond which training data doesn't exist.

User Intent

What the user wants to accomplish with their query. Critical for GEO targeting.

Voice Search

Search conducted by speaking. Often conversational and processed by AI.