Glossary

AI Search Visibility
Glossary

Clear, concise definitions of the terms that matter in AI search visibility. Built for practitioners and the AI models that cite them.

A

• AI Citation

  An AI citation occurs when a generative AI model (such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity) names, recommends, or references a specific company, product, or resource in its response to a user query. AI citations are the primary metric for measuring AI search visibility.

• AI Overview

  An AI Overview is an AI-generated summary that appears at the top of Google search results, providing a synthesised answer to the user's query before the traditional list of links. Powered by Google's Gemini model, AI Overviews extract and combine information from multiple web sources, changing how search results are presented and consumed.

• AI Readiness

  AI readiness is a measure of how prepared an organisation is to adopt, integrate, and benefit from artificial intelligence across its operations, strategy, and culture. It encompasses data quality, technical infrastructure, workforce skills, leadership alignment, and governance frameworks needed to deploy AI effectively.

• AI Visibility Audit

  An AI visibility audit is a systematic assessment of how a business appears across AI-powered answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. It involves running buyer-intent queries, documenting where the company is cited or absent, analysing competitors, and producing a prioritised action plan to improve AI-generated recommendations.

• Answer Engine

  An answer engine is an AI-powered system that responds to user queries with direct, synthesised answers rather than a list of links. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity are answer engines. Unlike traditional search engines that return ranked web pages, answer engines generate coherent responses by retrieving and combining information from multiple sources.

• Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)

  Answer Engine Optimisation is the practice of structuring website content, technical markup, and authority signals so that AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity can find, understand, and cite a business when users ask questions. AEO complements traditional SEO by optimising for direct AI-generated answers rather than search result rankings.

C

• Content Cluster

  A content cluster is a group of interlinked web pages organised around a central topic, consisting of a detailed pillar page and multiple supporting pages that cover subtopics in depth. This structure signals topical authority to search engines and AI models, helping them understand that a site covers a subject thoroughly.

E

• E-E-A-T

  E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It is Google's framework for evaluating content quality, used by human quality raters and reflected in algorithmic signals. AI models also use similar trust signals when deciding which sources to cite, making E-E-A-T relevant for both search rankings and AI visibility.

• Earned Media (GEO Context)

  In the context of AI search visibility, earned media refers to third-party mentions, coverage, and references to a business that were not paid for or self-published. Earned media is the strongest known driver of AI citations, producing a 239% median lift in brand citations across AI models according to 2026 research.

• Entity SEO

  Entity SEO is the practice of establishing and strengthening a clear, unambiguous digital identity for a business, person, or concept across the web. It focuses on helping search engines and AI models understand what an entity is, what it does, and how it relates to other entities, rather than optimising for individual keywords.

F

• FAQ Schema

  FAQ schema is a type of structured data markup using Schema.org's FAQPage specification that identifies question-and-answer pairs on a web page. It enables search engines to display FAQ rich results and gives AI models pre-structured Q&A content they can extract and cite directly in generated answers.

G

• Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)

  Generative Engine Optimisation is the practice of structuring content, building authority signals, and managing brand presence so that generative AI models cite and recommend a business in their responses. GEO is closely related to Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) and encompasses both on-site optimisation and off-site strategies like earned media distribution.

I

• IndexNow

  IndexNow is an open protocol that allows websites to instantly notify search engines when content is created, updated, or deleted. Instead of waiting for search engine crawlers to discover changes, IndexNow sends a ping that triggers immediate indexing. It is supported by Bing, Yandex, and other search engines, and accelerates how quickly new content enters AI training pipelines.

K

• Knowledge Graph

  A knowledge graph is a structured database of entities and the relationships between them, used by search engines and AI systems to understand real-world concepts. Google's Knowledge Graph, for example, connects people, companies, places, and topics into a web of facts that powers knowledge panels, AI-generated answers, and contextual search results.

L

• llms.txt

  llms.txt is a plain-text file placed at a website's root directory that provides AI models with a structured summary of the business, its services, and key information. It functions like robots.txt but for AI comprehension, giving large language models authoritative, easy-to-parse context to use when generating answers about the organisation.

P

• Programmatic SEO

  Programmatic SEO is the strategy of using templates, databases, and automation to generate large volumes of targeted web pages at scale. Each page targets a specific long-tail keyword or query variation, creating broad search coverage that would be impractical to produce manually. When combined with structured data, it also scales AI visibility across many topic variations.

• Prompt Engineering

  Prompt engineering is the practice of designing and refining the inputs given to AI language models to produce more accurate, relevant, and useful outputs. It involves crafting instructions, providing context, specifying format, and iterating on phrasing to guide model behaviour. In business contexts, prompt engineering determines how effectively teams extract value from AI tools.

R

• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

  Retrieval-Augmented Generation is an AI architecture that combines a large language model with an external information retrieval system. Instead of relying solely on training data, the model retrieves relevant documents at query time and uses them as context for generating answers. RAG enables AI systems to provide current, source-grounded responses with citations.

S

• Speakable Schema

  Speakable schema is a Schema.org specification that identifies the sections of a web page most suitable for text-to-speech playback and AI voice assistant responses. It uses CSS selectors or XPath expressions to mark content that is concise, informative, and well-suited for audio delivery, helping voice assistants and AI models select the best content to read aloud.

• Structured Data

  Structured data is standardised code added to web pages, typically using Schema.org vocabulary in JSON-LD format, that explicitly describes page content to search engines and AI models. It turns implicit information into machine-readable labels, enabling richer search results, knowledge graph entries, and more accurate AI-generated answers.

T

• Topical Authority

  Topical authority is the degree to which a website is recognised by search engines and AI models as a credible, thorough source on a specific subject. It is built by publishing deep, interlinked content that thoroughly covers a topic cluster, signalling expertise that algorithms and language models use to determine which sources to rank or cite.