GEO AI

Agentic browsing

AI agents · Autonomous agents

AI systems that navigate websites on a user's behalf — reading pages, filling forms, comparing options and sometimes completing transactions.

AI content licensing

Publisher AI deals

Commercial agreements in which publishers license their content to AI companies for training, retrieval or attribution, as an alternative to blocking crawlers.

AI crawler

AI bot · LLM crawler

An automated agent operated by an AI company to fetch web content for model training, search indexing, or live retrieval when answering a user's question.

AI Mode

Google's conversational search experience for complex, multi-part questions, returning a reasoned AI response with supporting links instead of a classic result list.

AI Overviews

AIO · SGE

Google's AI-generated summaries shown at the top of many search results, synthesising information from multiple web pages with links to the sources.

AI referral traffic

LLM referrals

Visits arriving from AI assistants and answer engines, identifiable in analytics by referrer hosts such as chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, claude.ai and copilot.microsoft.com.

AI visibility

AI search visibility

The extent to which a brand appears, is cited, or is recommended across AI-generated answers, measured by sampling prompts rather than by rank positions.

Answer engine

AI search engine

A system that responds to a question with a synthesised answer and citations rather than a ranked list of documents — for example Perplexity, ChatGPT search or Google's AI…

Answer Engine Optimization

AEO

Optimising content to be the source of a direct answer in features and assistants that answer questions rather than list links.

Brand mention monitoring

Mention tracking

Tracking where a brand is named across the web and inside AI answers, including whether the description is accurate and the sentiment favourable.

ChatGPT-User

User-triggered fetcher

OpenAI's agent that fetches a specific page in real time because a user or an agentic task requested it, rather than for indexing or training.

Chunk retrieval

Passage retrieval

Retrieving individual segments of a document rather than whole pages, which is how most AI search and RAG systems select what to feed a model.

Citation share

Source share

The proportion of AI answer citations across a tracked prompt set that point to a given domain, used as the AI-era analogue of ranking share.

ClaudeBot

Claude-Web · Claude-User · Claude-SearchBot

Anthropic's family of web crawlers and fetchers, including a general crawler and agents that retrieve pages for search results and for individual user requests.

Context window

Context length

The maximum amount of text a language model can consider at once, which bounds how much retrieved content can be supplied when generating an answer.

Embedding

Vector embedding

A numerical vector representing the meaning of text, an image or another item, positioned so that semantically similar items lie close together in the vector space.

Generative Engine Optimization

GEO

The practice of improving how often and how accurately a brand's content is retrieved, cited and represented in AI-generated answers.

Google-Extended

A robots.txt control token that governs whether a site's content can be used to improve Gemini models and grounded Gemini API responses, without affecting Google Search.

GPTBot

OpenAI's crawler used to collect publicly available web content that may be used to improve future models; controllable via robots.txt.

Grounding

Search grounding

Constraining a language model's output to information retrieved from a specified source — a search index, a document set or a database — so answers can be attributed and…

Hallucination

Confabulation

A confident, fluent but factually wrong or fabricated statement produced by a language model, including invented citations, prices, features or quotes.

Knowledge cutoff

Training cutoff

The date after which a language model has no training data, so anything more recent is unknown to it unless supplied through retrieval.

LLM Optimization

LLMO · AI SEO

A loosely used umbrella term for making a brand and its content well-represented in large language model outputs, whether from retrieval or from training data.

llms.txt

A proposed Markdown file at a site's root listing its most important content for language models; a community convention, not a standard, and not used by Google Search.

Model Context Protocol

MCP

An open protocol standardising how AI applications connect to external tools and data sources, letting assistants query systems directly rather than scraping interfaces.

Model training opt-out

AI training controls

Mechanisms by which a publisher signals that its content should not be used to train AI models, principally robots.txt tokens and contractual or technical blocking.

OAI-SearchBot

OpenAI's crawler that builds the search index used to surface and link websites in ChatGPT search results; distinct from the training crawler GPTBot.

PerplexityBot

Perplexity-User

Perplexity's crawler for building its search index, alongside a separate user-triggered agent that fetches pages in response to specific requests.

Prompt volume

Prompt research

An estimate of how often a given question or prompt is asked of AI assistants — a nascent, poorly measured analogue of search volume.

Query fan-out

Query decomposition

The technique in AI search of breaking one complex user question into many related sub-queries, running them in parallel, and synthesising the results.

Retrieval-augmented generation

RAG

An architecture where a system retrieves relevant documents or passages first and then has a language model generate an answer conditioned on them.

Search generative AI control

A Search Console setting letting site owners include or exclude their site from Google's generative AI features — AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative features in Discover.

Semantic chunking

Content chunking

Splitting documents along meaning boundaries — sections, topics, complete ideas — rather than at fixed character counts, to produce coherent retrievable units.

Share of voice in LLMs

AI share of voice

A brand's share of all brand mentions across a set of AI-generated answers for a category, whether or not those mentions carry a citation link.

Synthetic traffic

Bot traffic · Non-human traffic

Automated, non-human requests to a site — crawlers, scrapers, monitoring, agents — which increasingly outnumber human visits and distort analytics if not filtered.

Vector search

Semantic retrieval · ANN search

Retrieval by nearest-neighbour similarity between embedding vectors rather than by keyword matching, usually implemented with approximate nearest-neighbour indexes.

Zero-click search

No-click search

A search where the user's need is satisfied on the results page itself — by a snippet, knowledge panel, calculator or AI Overview — and no result is clicked.