AI search glossary

Answer engine

A system that responds to a question with a synthesized answer rather than a list of links, often citing sources. Examples include ChatGPT with search, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude with web search, Google AI Overviews, and Microsoft Copilot.

Generative engine optimization (GEO)

The practice of improving how content is discovered, understood, cited, and represented by answer engines. Also called answer engine optimization (AEO) or AI search optimization. It overlaps heavily with technical SEO and with publishing clear, factual, well-structured content.

Observation

One answer from one engine to one prompt at one time, stored with its text, citations, and model identifier.

Mention

An answer names an organization. Signal matches whole words against the brand name and alternate names.

Citation

An answer links to a source URL. A citation of your own domain indicates the engine relied on your content.

Share of voice

Your mentions as a share of all mentions of tracked organizations in the same answers.

Retrieval crawler

A crawler that fetches pages to answer or cite them in real time, such as OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot. Blocking one removes your pages from that engine's live answers.

Training crawler

A crawler or opt-out token that governs whether content is used to train models, such as GPTBot or Google-Extended. Allowing or blocking training is a policy decision separate from live citation.

llms.txt

A proposed convention: a Markdown file at /llms.txt that summarizes a site and links to its most useful pages for language models. It is optional and not a ranking factor in any published engine documentation.

Structured data

Machine-readable descriptions of page content, usually JSON-LD using the schema.org vocabulary, that help systems identify entities such as organizations, products, and articles.

Confidence interval

A range that expresses the uncertainty of a rate measured from a sample. Signal reports 95% Wilson score intervals.