# The AI-Search Glossary

> Plain, sourced definitions of the vocabulary of AI search and GEO, by rawmktg. (Vinayak Ravi). Source: https://rawmktg.com/glossary

## Core AI-search concepts
- [Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/generative-engine-optimization): 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.
- [Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/answer-engine-optimization): 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.
- [AI Overviews](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/ai-overviews): 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.
- [Generative engine](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/generative-engine): 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.
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/retrieval-augmented-generation): 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.
- [LLM citation](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/llm-citation): 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.
- [Citation gap](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/citation-gap): 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.
- [Share of Model](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/share-of-model): 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.

## Coined at rawmktg.
- [Answer Capsule](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/answer-capsule): 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.
- [Proof-Pairing Density](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/proof-pairing-density): 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.

## The technical layer
- [llms.txt](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/llms-txt): 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.
- [OAI-SearchBot](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/oai-searchbot): 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.
- [PerplexityBot](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/perplexitybot): The crawler Perplexity uses to discover and index web pages so they can be retrieved and cited as sources in its AI-generated answers.
- [GPTBot vs OAI-SearchBot](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/gptbot-vs-oai-searchbot): 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.
- [Common Crawl / CCBot](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/common-crawl-ccbot): 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.
- [Schema markup (structured data)](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/schema-markup): Structured data added to a page's code, using the Schema.
- [@graph](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/graph-schema): A Schema.
- [Entity resolution](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/entity-resolution): 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.
- [Knowledge graph](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/knowledge-graph): A structured network of entities, people, companies, products, places, and the relationships between them, that a search or AI system uses to understand and.

## Content & authority
- [Topical authority](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/topical-authority): 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](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/e-e-a-t): E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness: Google's framework for assessing content quality, which has now become a.
- [Content half-life](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/content-half-life): 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.
- [Authority seeding](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/authority-seeding): The practice of building a brand's reputation across third-party sites, communities and publications so that AI systems encounter consistent, trusted signals.
- [Unlinked brand mentions](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/unlinked-brand-mentions): 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.
- [Brand hallucination](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/brand-hallucination): 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.
- [Answer-lead formatting](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/answer-lead-formatting): 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.

## Measurement
- [Prompt-to-citation tracking](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/prompt-to-citation-tracking): 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.
- [Prompt portfolio](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/prompt-portfolio): 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.
- [AI referral traffic](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/ai-referral-traffic): 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.

## Bridging SEO terms
- [Link intersect](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/link-intersect): 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.
- [Domain Rating (DR)](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/domain-rating): 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.
- [Referring domains](https://rawmktg.com/glossary/referring-domains): 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.