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AEO vocabulary is small but precise: share of answer, source citation versus named mention, GPTBot versus OAI-SearchBot, grounding, entity. This glossary defines more than 40 terms in one quotable sentence each, in the sense helloAISearch uses them, with a link to the tool or guide that goes deeper.
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Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of getting a brand named, recommended or cited inside the answers that AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity write, the way SEO gets a page ranked in Google results.
An AI citation is a mention of a brand, product or page inside an answer generated by an AI engine, either as a named recommendation in the text or as a linked source the answer draws on.
AI Mode is Google's conversational search tab that answers a query with a written response and follow-up questions, a separate surface from Gemini and from AI Overviews with its own citation behaviour.
AI Overviews are the AI-written summaries Google shows at the top of some search result pages, with links to the pages the summary drew on, fed by Googlebot's index rather than by a separate crawler.
AI visibility is how often and how prominently a brand appears in AI-generated answers to the questions its customers ask, measured across engines, prompts and time rather than from a single check.
An answer engine is an AI system such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity that responds to a question with one written answer naming a handful of brands and sources, instead of a ranked list of links.
Answer-first is the writing pattern of opening a page with a two-to-four sentence paragraph that fully answers the question in the H1, naming the brand, before any subheading or preamble.
A brand alias is another spelling or form of a brand name that counts as the same brand when an answer is scored, such as the domain, a product name or a former name.
BreadcrumbList is the schema.org type that declares a page's position in the site as an ordered list of links, which tells an engine which section and which entity the page belongs to.
A canonical URL is the address declared in a page's rel=canonical link as the one true location of that content, so engines attribute the page to a single URL instead of splitting it across duplicates.
Citation rate is the percentage of tracked answers in which a brand is named or linked, across a prompt set and a period, and it is the number that moves when a new page starts working.
Cited is the mention status for a brand named with a URL directly after it in the answer, which means the engine both recommended the brand and pointed at its page.
ClaudeBot is Anthropic's crawler for model training data, separate from Claude-User, which fetches a page when a Claude user asks about it, and Claude-SearchBot, which indexes pages Claude can cite.
A competitor set is the fixed list of rival brands counted alongside your own in every answer, which is what turns a count of mentions into a share.
Microsoft Copilot is Microsoft's AI assistant in Windows, Edge and Bing, whose answers draw on Bing's index, so Bingbot access and Bing indexing decide whether a page can be cited there.
Crawl, index and cite are three separate steps: a crawler fetches the page, the engine stores and understands it, and an answer names or links it, and a page can pass the first two and still never be cited.
An entity is a thing an engine knows as one object, such as a company, product or person, with a name, a description and links to the profiles that confirm it exists outside its own site.
FAQPage is the schema.org type for a page with a list of questions and answers, marked up in JSON-LD so an engine can read each pair whole, and it should repeat the visible FAQ word for word.
Featured is the mention status for a brand named in the first quarter of an answer in a position that reads as the lead recommendation, such as the first bullet, the opening sentence or after “options include”.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of shaping content so that generative AI engines draw on it and name the brand behind it when they generate answers, and in day-to-day use it describes the same work as AEO from the content side.
A GEO score is a 0–100 checklist score of how ready one page is for AI answers, covering answer-first copy, question headings, FAQ and Organization schema, and whether the crawlers that feed answers may read it.
Google-Extended is a robots.txt token that controls whether Google may use a site's content to train and ground Gemini models, and it does not affect Google Search ranking, AI Overviews or AI Mode, which Googlebot feeds.
GPTBot is OpenAI's crawler for collecting training data, and blocking it in robots.txt does not stop ChatGPT from searching or browsing a site, which OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User do under their own tokens.
Grounding is giving a language model retrieved documents or search results to answer from, so the answer is tied to sources it can cite rather than to the model's memory alone.
A hallucination is a confident statement in an AI answer that no source supports, such as a price, a feature or a customer the engine invented, which grounding and consistent facts across the web make less likely.
HowTo is the schema.org type for step-by-step instructions, with a name, an optional total time and an ordered list of steps, which engines can lift as a procedure when a prompt starts with “how do I”.
JSON-LD is the JSON format for schema.org structured data placed in a script tag in a page's head, where engines read facts about the page and the organisation behind it without parsing the visible HTML.
A knowledge graph is the store of entities and the relationships between them that a search engine or answer engine consults to know that a name, a domain and a LinkedIn page are the same company.
llms.txt is a plain Markdown file served at the root of a site that tells AI crawlers, in a few hundred words, what the site is, who it is for and which pages matter.
Mentioned is the mention status for a brand that appears in the answer's prose without a citation and outside the lead position, which puts it in the answer but not as the pick.
Missed is the mention status for a brand that does not appear anywhere in the answer, which is the status every prompt has until a page wins it.
A named mention is the engine writing a brand's name into the answer text itself, as a recommendation or an example, whether or not a link follows it, and it is what a buyer acts on.
OAI-SearchBot is the OpenAI crawler that indexes pages for ChatGPT search, so a site that blocks it cannot appear as a source in ChatGPT's search-backed answers.
Organization schema is the JSON-LD node that describes the company behind a site, with name, url, logo, description and sameAs, and it is the node engines merge every page into when they build the brand's entity.
PerplexityBot is the crawler that builds Perplexity's search index, and because Perplexity cites sources on every answer, blocking it removes a site from the most visible form of AI citation there is.
A prompt is the question a person types into an AI assistant, and in AI visibility tracking it is the unit of measurement: one prompt on one engine on one day produces one answer to score.
A prompt set is the fixed list of questions a brand tracks across engines on a schedule, held steady so that a change in who gets named reflects the content and not the questions.
A question heading is an H1 or H2 phrased as the question a buyer would ask, such as “Is Acme good for freelancers?”, so that the section beneath it reads to an engine as the answer.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is the pipeline behind grounded answers: retrieve the pages relevant to the question, then have the model write the answer from those pages and cite them.
robots.txt is the file at the root of a site that tells crawlers, by user-agent token, which paths they may fetch, and it is where AI training bots and AI answer bots are allowed or blocked separately.
sameAs is the schema.org property on an Organization or Person node that lists the URLs of the same entity elsewhere, such as LinkedIn, X, Crunchbase, GitHub or Wikidata, so engines can merge the profiles into one.
Sentiment in AI visibility is the tone an engine uses around a brand's name in an answer, positive, neutral or negative, which decides whether a mention helps or arrives with a “but”.
Share of answer is one brand's count of namings across a set of AI answers divided by the namings of every tracked brand, so a set where you are named once and a competitor twice gives you 33% and them 67%.
Share of voice in AI search is share of answer measured over time: mentions of one brand divided by mentions of every tracked brand, for a fixed set of prompts and engines over a period, charted as a trend.
A source citation is a link or footnote in an AI answer pointing at the page the engine drew a fact from, which Perplexity shows on every answer and ChatGPT and Gemini show when they browse or search.
Today's Move is helloAISearch's daily recommendation after a scan: the one prompt where a competitor was named and the brand was not, with the page to write to win it and the schema to add.
A zero-click result is a search or AI answer that satisfies the person without a visit to any site, which is why being named inside the answer matters more than being linked from it.
Every term above is something helloAISearch measures or checks: share of answer per prompt and engine, source citations versus named mentions, tone, and the pages the answers drew on. The words are the easy part.
Knowing what share of answer means does not tell you yours. The number that matters is the one you have not measured yet.
One check is a snapshot. A schedule is a measurement.
helloAISearch runs your prompts on ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity on a schedule, highlights every mention, and turns each gap into one move per day.
Questions
Nearly none in practice. GEO, generative engine optimization, is the term from the 2023 research paper; AEO, answer engine optimization, is the one operators use. Both mean getting named inside generated answers. This glossary treats them as the same work described from two angles.
Because they behave differently. A named mention is what a buyer acts on; a source citation is the engine showing where it read something. A brand with citations and no mentions has pages the engines use but do not recommend, which is the gap a comparison page usually closes.
Yes, with a link. Each one is written as a single complete sentence so it can be lifted whole by a person or an engine, which is also the pattern the glossary recommends for your own pages.
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