Glossary | AirPulse AI

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)also: Generative Engine Optimisation

The practice of optimising content, entities, and structured data so AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini cite or recommend you when they generate answers. GEO targets AI selection probability rather than the ranked link list returned by a traditional search engine.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)also: Answer Engine Optimisation

A near-synonym for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) that emphasises optimising for AI assistants and answer engines specifically — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overview, Bing Copilot. GEO is the broader category term that has emerged in 2024-2026; AEO is used interchangeably and predates it slightly.

AI Visibility

How often, how accurately, and how favorably your brand is described by AI assistants when prospective buyers ask about your category. AI Visibility is the outcome that Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) optimises for, and the metric AirPulse measures across the major AI engines.

Answer Engine

An AI system that synthesises an answer from multiple sources rather than returning a list of links. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overview, and Bing Copilot are all answer engines. Their selection criteria — which sources to cite — drive Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).

AI Overviewalso: Google AI Overview, AIO

Google's AI-generated answer block that appears above the organic search results on selected queries. AI Overviews synthesize content from multiple web sources and significantly reduce click-through to the underlying links on affected queries.

Hallucination

When an AI assistant states something false with confidence — including misattributing features, prices, integrations, or positioning to your brand. AI Visibility platforms like AirPulse detect hallucinations by comparing AI responses against a verified record of facts about your company.

Related: Brand Studio · AI Visibility

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

An architecture where an AI model retrieves relevant documents at query time and grounds its answer in them, rather than relying on training data alone. RAG is why fresh, well-structured content can be cited by AI assistants even if it post-dates the model's training cutoff.

AI Visibility Score

A single composite metric that captures how often, how accurately, and how favorably AI engines represent your brand on the prompts your buyers actually use. AirPulse's AI Visibility Score is computed per brand, per engine, and per prompt segment.

Share of Voice (AI)

The share of AI-generated answers in your category in which your brand is mentioned, relative to competitors. Tracked per engine. The AI equivalent of share of voice in traditional brand measurement, but on a per-prompt rather than per-impression basis.

Related: AI Visibility Score · Brand Pulse

Citation Decay

The phenomenon where an AI assistant stops citing a previously preferred source as fresher or higher-authority alternatives appear. Citation decay is why GEO is a continuous activity, not a one-shot optimisation — visibility you earn in 2025 will erode without maintenance in 2026.

Pre-click Era

Describes the segment of the buyer journey that now happens inside AI assistants before any click reaches your website. Influence in the pre-click era depends on how AI engines describe and recommend you, not on click-through-rate or session metrics.

Zero-click Journey

A buyer research session that completes inside an AI assistant or search engine without a click to any vendor website. Common in early-funnel B2B research. The brand that wins the synthesis wins the consideration set, even though no traffic is recorded in their analytics.

Related: Pre-click Era

llms.txt

A plain-text file at the root of a website that summarises the site's purpose, structure, and key facts in a form designed for AI assistants. The emerging convention for telling AI vendors what your site is and how to describe it. AirPulse's lives at /llms.txt with an expanded variant at /llms-full.txt.

robots.txt for AI crawlers

robots.txt is the longstanding standard for telling web crawlers which paths they may visit. AI vendors honour the file with named user-agents like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, and Applebot-Extended. Explicitly allowing these agents signals intentional AI accessibility.

Related: llms.txt

JSON-LD

JSON-formatted Linked Data — the recommended way to embed schema.org structured data in a web page. AI assistants parse JSON-LD to disambiguate entities (your company, products, authors, prices), which is why high-quality schema is a foundational GEO move.

Related: schema.org · sameAs

schema.org

The shared vocabulary for structured data on the web, jointly maintained by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex. Schema.org defines types like Organization, Article, Product, FAQPage, HowTo, and Person — all of which AI engines use to extract structured facts.

Related: JSON-LD · sameAs

sameAs

A schema.org property that lists external URLs which refer to the same entity — e.g. a brand's LinkedIn, X, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Crunchbase URLs. sameAs is the primary signal AI assistants use to resolve which Organization or Person they are talking about when disambiguating brand names.

Related: JSON-LD · schema.org

E-E-A-Talso: EEAT

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness — Google's content-quality framework, now widely adopted as a heuristic for AI selection. AI engines preferentially cite content with identifiable authors, verifiable credentials, sourced claims, and external corroboration.

Speakable schema

A schema.org marker that tells AI assistants which portions of a page are most appropriate to read aloud or quote verbatim. Often used on hero paragraphs and short definitional answer blocks; useful for voice surfaces and AI summarisation.

Related: schema.org · JSON-LD

Visibility (AirPulse module)

The AirPulse Analytics dashboard that tracks how often and how favorably ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot mention your brand across tracked prompts, with Share of Voice (AI) and sentiment over time.

Brand Pulse

AirPulse's brand-level analytics view, filtered by topic. Brand Pulse shows where AI mentions of your company are growing or fading by engine and by topic, helping you focus content effort where momentum exists or is at risk.

Prompt Pulse

AirPulse's buyer-prompt library and analytics module. Tracks which prompts AI engines surface your brand on, which surface competitors instead, and helps grow coverage by generating realistic long-tail buyer prompts for your category.

Engine Insights

Per-engine breakdown of how each AI assistant (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot) describes your brand and which sources it cites. Engine Insights surfaces where engines disagree — a useful signal for which content gaps to close first.

Citations (AirPulse module)

Tracks which pages and domains AI assistants cite when answering prompts in your category. The Citations module makes the source mix visible — your own site, competitor sites, Reddit, Wikipedia, third-party reviews — so you can prioritise the sources that drive your visibility.

Related: Engine Insights

AI Traffic (Agent Pulse)

Detection and attribution of AI-crawler and AI-agent traffic to your domains. AI Traffic separates classic referral traffic from agent-driven visits and helps you understand which AI sources actually drive humans to your site versus those that answer the query without a click.

Opportunities (AirPulse module)

AirPulse's content-gap engine. Identifies high-impact pages to create or update, prioritised by potential AI-visibility lift. Surfaces the prompts where competitors win and you should not, alongside specific structural and entity-coverage recommendations.

Content Pulse

AirPulse's editor for AI-optimised content. Surfaces the HTML structure and schema markup alongside the text as you write, so content teams ship pages built for both human readers and AI selection.

Brand Studio

AirPulse's authoritative record of how your brand should be represented: positioning, product facts, differentiators, messaging guardrails. Every other AirPulse module reads from Brand Studio, so AI-facing assets stay consistent.

Related: Brand Pulse · Hallucination

Customer Profiles (ICP Builder)

AirPulse's ideal-customer-profile builder. Map each ICP segment to the prompts those buyers actually use, and AirPulse generates tailored prompt libraries you can track in Prompt Pulse.

Related: Prompt Pulse