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AI visibility glossary

The terms behind how AI engines answer questions about businesses, defined in one sentence each.

  • AEO

    Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the work of making a business easy for AI answer engines to find, understand and name when people ask them questions.

  • AI crawlers

    AI crawlers are the bots AI companies use to fetch web pages, such as OpenAI’s GPTBot, Anthropic’s ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot; Google-Extended is a robots.txt token controlling use of content for Google’s AI models.

  • AI Mode

    Google AI Mode is a conversational search experience in Google Search that answers longer questions and follow-ups with an AI-written response and links to sources.

  • AI Overviews

    Google AI Overviews are AI-written summaries shown at the top of some Google Search results, with links to the web pages the summary drew on.

  • Answer engine

    An answer engine is a search tool that replies to a question with a written answer, rather than a list of links.

  • Citation

    A citation is a source that an AI engine links to or names as the basis for its answer.

  • Entity

    In search and AI, an entity is a uniquely identifiable thing, such as a business, person, place or product, that systems recognise and connect to facts, often through a knowledge graph.

  • GEO

    Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the practice of shaping content so generative AI systems mention or cite it in their answers; in day-to-day use it means much the same as AEO.

  • llms.txt

    llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file at the root of a website (/llms.txt) that gives AI models a short Markdown summary of the site and links to its most useful pages.

  • Prompt tracking

    Prompt tracking means asking AI engines the same set of customer questions on a schedule and recording each answer, so you can see whether, where and how often your business appears over time.

  • Share of voice

    In AI visibility, share of voice is the portion of all brand mentions in AI answers, across a set of customer questions, that belong to you rather than your competitors.

  • Structured data

    Structured data is machine-readable code, usually JSON-LD using the schema.org vocabulary, that states facts about a page or business, such as its name, address, products, opening hours or FAQs.

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