Resources/Glossary

The GEO & SEO Glossary

GEO and SEO definitions for the terms behind getting found in Google, ChatGPT, Claude, and every AI answer in between.

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GEO

Generative Engine Optimization

Optimizing your site and brand so AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity mention, cite, and recommend you in their answers.

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GEO

AI Overviews

Google's AI-written summaries that appear above traditional results and link out to the sources they draw from.

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Technical

llms.txt

A proposed plain-text file at your site root that points language models to your most useful pages.

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A

GEO

AI Agents

AI agents are AI systems that plan and take actions to complete a goal, such as browsing websites, using apps or filling out forms, rather than only answering questions, usually with user confirmation for key steps.

GEO

AI Citation

An AI citation is a link or source reference to your web page inside an AI-generated answer, showing that tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot or Google AI Overviews used your content.

GEO

AI Crawlers

AI crawlers are bots run by AI companies, such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot, that fetch web pages to train models, build AI search indexes, or read pages live when a user asks a question.

Content

AI-Generated Content

AI-generated content is text, images, audio or video created wholly or partly by an AI model. Google allows it in Search when it is accurate and genuinely helpful, but using it mainly to manipulate rankings violates spam policies.

GEO

AI Hallucination

An AI hallucination is a confident, plausible-sounding answer from an AI model that is false, unsupported or made up, such as invented statistics, fake citations or wrong details about a business.

GEO

AI Overviews

AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that Google shows at the top of some search results, answering the query directly and linking to supporting web pages for further reading.

Analytics

AI Referral Traffic

AI referral traffic is the website visits that come from people clicking links inside AI tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Copilot, tracked in analytics through referrer domains, UTM tags and channels like GA4's AI Assistant group.

GEO

AI Search Engine

An AI search engine uses a large language model to retrieve web sources and write a direct, conversational answer to a question, usually with citations, instead of only returning a ranked list of links.

Analytics

AI Share of Voice

AI share of voice is the percentage of relevant AI-generated answers that mention or cite your brand compared with competitors, measured across a defined set of prompts and AI platforms.

SEO

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. It tells readers what to expect when they click and gives search engines a short description of the linked page.

GEO

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)

Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring content and building trust so answer engines, such as AI assistants, AI search and featured snippets, select your information and credit your brand in direct answers.

C

Technical

Canonical Tag

A canonical tag is an HTML link element (rel="canonical") that tells search engines which URL is the preferred version of a page when the same or very similar content exists at multiple addresses. Google treats it as a strong hint, not a directive.

GEO

ChatGPT Search

ChatGPT Search is the web search feature built into ChatGPT that retrieves current web pages and answers questions with inline citations and a sources panel, available on all plans including Free as of 2026.

Analytics

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who click a link after seeing it, calculated as clicks divided by impressions. In search, it shows how often your result gets chosen when it appears.

GEO

Content Chunking

Content chunking is breaking content into smaller, self-contained sections. AI retrieval systems split pages into chunks before indexing them, so pages built from focused, clearly labeled sections are easier to retrieve and quote accurately.

Content

Content Refresh

A content refresh is the process of meaningfully updating an existing page, correcting outdated facts, adding new information and improving structure, so it stays accurate and useful. It usually keeps the same URL and the links it has earned.

GEO

Conversational Search

Conversational search is a way of searching where people ask questions in natural language and refine them with follow-ups, while the search system remembers earlier context and replies with direct answers and source links.

Technical

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are Google's three real-user experience metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (loading, good at 2.5s or less), Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness, 200ms or less) and Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability, 0.1 or less).

Technical

Crawl Budget

Crawl budget is the set of URLs a search engine like Google can and wants to crawl on a site, determined by its crawl capacity limit (what your server can handle) and crawl demand (how much Google wants your content).

Technical

Crawling

Crawling is the process search engines and AI tools use to discover and download web pages, with automated bots following links and sitemaps from page to page. A page must be crawled before it can be indexed or shown in results.

G

GEO

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of making your brand and content easy for AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews to find, trust and cite when they generate answers.

GEO

Google AI Mode

Google AI Mode is a conversational search experience in Google Search that uses Gemini models and query fan-out to answer complex questions with an AI-generated response linking to supporting websites.

Analytics

Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is Google's event-based analytics platform for websites and apps. It tracks how visitors arrive and what they do, including engagement and key events, and replaced Universal Analytics in 2023.

Technical

Googlebot

Googlebot is Google's main web crawler, made up of Googlebot Smartphone and Googlebot Desktop, which fetches and renders pages so Google Search can index them. Most requests come from the smartphone crawler.

SEO

Google Business Profile

A Google Business Profile is a free business listing that appears in Google Search and Google Maps, showing details like your hours, address or service area, phone number, photos, and customer reviews.

SEO

Google Core Update

A Google core update is a broad change to Google's ranking systems that reassesses content quality across the whole web. It isn't a penalty and doesn't target specific sites, but it can shift rankings significantly.

GEO

Google Gemini

Google Gemini is Google's family of multimodal AI models and the name of its AI assistant app. Gemini models power AI Overviews and AI Mode, and the app can ground answers in Google Search.

Analytics

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is Google's free tool for monitoring how a website performs in Google Search, showing real clicks, impressions, queries, indexing status, and technical issues reported directly by Google.

GEO

Grounding

Grounding is the practice of tying an AI model's answer to specific, verifiable sources, such as search results or documents, rather than only its training data. It reduces hallucinations and makes citations possible.

S

Content

Scaled Content Abuse

Scaled content abuse is a Google spam policy against producing many pages mainly to manipulate search rankings rather than help users, typically with unoriginal, low-value content, whether the pages are made by AI, humans or both.

Technical

Schema Markup

Schema markup is structured data code, based on the schema.org vocabulary, that describes a page's content in a machine-readable way. It helps search engines understand pages and can make them eligible for rich results.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of improving a website's content, technical setup and reputation so search engines can find, understand and rank its pages, helping the right people discover it through organic search.

Content

Search Quality Rater Guidelines

The Search Quality Rater Guidelines are Google's public manual for human raters who evaluate search results. They describe how to judge page quality and whether results meet a searcher's needs, but ratings don't directly affect rankings.

SEO

Search Volume

Search volume is an estimate of how many times a keyword is searched in a given period, usually shown as average monthly searches for a specific country or language.

GEO

Semantic Search

Semantic search is a search approach that matches queries to content based on meaning, intent and context rather than exact keyword overlap, so a page can rank or be retrieved even when it uses different words than the searcher.

SEO

SERP

A SERP (search engine results page) is the page a search engine displays in response to a query, combining organic results, paid ads and features such as AI Overviews, featured snippets, local packs and People also ask.

Technical

Site Architecture

Site architecture is how a website's pages are organized and linked together, through navigation, categories, URLs and internal links. A clear structure helps visitors find content and helps search engines discover pages and understand which matter most.

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