The vocabulary of AI search, defined.

The practice of structuring a brand's content and off-site signals so that AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews cite and.

The practice of structuring content so it wins the single, direct answer that an answer engine or AI assistant returns to a question, rather than one position.

Google's AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of search results, answering a query directly and citing a small set of sources instead of only listing.

An AI system that answers a query by synthesising a single response from multiple retrieved sources, rather than returning a ranked list of links for the user.

The architecture most AI search systems use to answer a query: they retrieve relevant passages from an external source such as the web, then generate an answer.

A reference to a source that an AI system names or links inside a generated answer, marking that source as one of the pages the model drew on to produce its response.

The difference between how often AI systems cite one brand versus its competitors for the same set of buyer questions, exposing who owns the AI answer in a.

A GEO metric that measures how often a brand is named or cited in AI-generated answers across a defined set of buyer prompts, relative to its competitors.

A self-contained block of content, usually the opening sentences of a page or section, that states a complete, quotable answer to a single question, formatted.

The share of claims on a page that are paired with a verifiable proof point, such as a specific statistic, a cited source, or a named example, rather than left.

A plain-text file placed at a website's root that gives AI systems a curated, Markdown-formatted map of the site's most important content, so models can find.

OpenAI's crawler for its search product: it fetches and indexes web pages so they can be retrieved and cited when ChatGPT search answers a user's query.

The crawler Perplexity uses to discover and index web pages so they can be retrieved and cited as sources in its AI-generated answers.

Two different OpenAI crawlers: GPTBot collects data used to train models, while OAI-SearchBot builds the live search index that lets ChatGPT retrieve and cite.

A large public dataset of crawled web pages, gathered by its crawler CCBot, that many AI models and tools use as a training and reference corpus.

Structured data added to a page's code, using the Schema.

A Schema.

The process by which a search or AI system decides which real-world thing a name refers to, linking a brand, person or product to a single, disambiguated.

A structured network of entities, people, companies, products, places, and the relationships between them, that a search or AI system uses to understand and.

The depth and breadth of a brand's content across a subject area, which signals to search and AI systems that it is a credible source on that topic and makes.

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness: Google's framework for assessing content quality, which has now become a.

The rate at which a page loses its AI citations as it ages without being updated, reflecting that recency is now a hard ranking signal in AI search rather than.

The practice of building a brand's reputation across third-party sites, communities and publications so that AI systems encounter consistent, trusted signals.

References to a brand by name across the web that do not include a hyperlink, and which AI systems still read as trust and authority signals when deciding whom.

When an AI system states something false or misleading about a brand, such as wrong features, wrong category or invented facts, because it lacks clear.

A content structure that puts the direct answer to a question first, at the top of a page or section, before any context or build-up, so an AI system can.

The practice of measuring AI visibility by running a fixed set of buyer prompts across AI engines on a cadence and recording which brands get cited, since.

A curated, fixed set of buyer-intent prompts that a brand runs across AI engines on a regular cadence to measure its citation visibility consistently over time.

The visits a website receives from AI assistants and answer engines, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, when a user follows a cited source.

A backlink-analysis technique that finds the domains linking to several of your competitors but not to you, surfacing the specific sites most likely to link to.

A 0-to-100 score, popularised by Ahrefs, that estimates the strength of a website's backlink profile relative to other sites, used as a rough proxy for overall.

The number of unique websites that link to a given site, a backlink metric that counts distinct linking sources rather than the total number of individual links.