AEO and GEO glossary
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
- Making your brand and content easy for AI answer engines to understand, cite and recommend when buyers ask questions.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
- The broader practice of optimizing for generative AI surfaces, from chat assistants to AI Overviews, so generated answers include you.
- Answer engine
- Any system that responds with a generated answer instead of a list of links: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Copilot.
- Prompt
- The question a buyer asks an AI. Prompts are to AEO what keywords were to SEO, but conversational and intent-rich.
- Prompt cluster
- A group of prompt variants with the same underlying intent, tracked together so trends are readable.
- Citation
- A source an answer engine references when it answers. Earning citations for your URLs is how content wins authority.
- Citation position
- Where your URL sits in an answer's source list (first, top three, buried or absent). Position affects clicks and trust.
- llms.txt
- A file on your domain that tells AI systems what your site contains and how to use it.
- Structured data (schema)
- Machine-readable markup (JSON-LD) that lets engines parse your products, articles and FAQs precisely instead of guessing.
- AI traffic
- Visits influenced by AI systems: humans arriving from answers, plus indexing and training crawlers reading your site.
- Assistant-driven visit
- A human session that started from an AI answer rather than a search results page or an ad.
- Entity
- A distinct thing engines recognize, such as your product, your founder, a feature or a category. Missing entities mean vaguer answers.
- Action feed
- AirPulse's prioritized queue of fixes, content and publishing actions, ranked by expected visibility impact.
- GEO audit
- A staged technical and content review that scores how ready a site is to be read, trusted and cited by answer engines.
- Visibility score
- A 0 to 100 measure of how present your brand is across tracked prompts and engines, computed from real answer fetches.
See these terms measured on your own site.
The free audit reports your share of answer, citations and readability checks.
