AEO glossary

Short definitions of 54 AEO terms, A to Z. Each links to the guide that explains it in depth, and the terms are defined from the engines’ own documentation where it exists (see sources). Jump to a letter: A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · U · W · Z.

A

AEO (answer engine optimization)

Making content easy for AI and search answer engines to find, understand, trust and cite in direct answers. More in What is AEO?

Agentic browsing

An AI agent navigating websites and completing tasks for a user, such as comparing products or filling forms. More in Rendering, speed & snippet controls

AI Mode

Google Search's conversational AI experience, rolled out in the U.S. in May 2025, which uses query fan-out. More in Google AI Overviews & AI Mode

AI Overviews

AI-generated summaries with links shown at the top of some Google results; launched in the U.S. in May 2024. More in Google AI Overviews & AI Mode

AI share of voice

The share of brand mentions in AI answers, across a fixed prompt set, that belong to one brand. More in Measuring AI visibility

Answer engine

A system that responds to a question with a direct answer, often generated and cited, instead of a list of links. More in Engines

Applebot-Extended

A robots.txt token (not a crawler) that lets sites opt out of Apple using their content to train its models. More in AI crawlers & robots.txt

B

Bingbot

Microsoft's crawler for Bing, whose index also grounds Microsoft Copilot. More in Microsoft Copilot & Bing

Brand mention

A brand named in an AI answer or on a web page, with or without a link. More in Citations & mentions

C

CCBot

Common Crawl's crawler; its open dataset is widely used to train language models. More in AI crawlers & robots.txt

Chunking

Splitting content into small passages. Retrieval systems chunk internally; Google says sites need not chunk pages for AI. More in Content structure

Citation (AI)

A linked source shown in or beside an AI-generated answer. More in Citations & mentions

ClaudeBot

Anthropic's crawler for model training; Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User serve search and user fetches. More in Claude

Core Web Vitals

Google's user-experience metrics: LCP (loading), INP (responsiveness) and CLS (visual stability). More in Rendering, speed & snippet controls

D

DefinedTerm

A schema.org type for a term in a glossary or vocabulary, grouped in a DefinedTermSet. More in Schema examples

E

E-E-A-T

Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: the quality framework in Google's rater guidelines. More in E-E-A-T

Entity

A uniquely identifiable thing (person, organization, place, product or concept) that search systems can recognize. More in Entities & knowledge graphs

Entity home

The single URL you treat as the authoritative description of an entity, such as an About or author page. More in Entities & knowledge graphs

F

FAQPage

Schema.org type for a page of questions and answers. Google stopped showing FAQ rich results on May 7, 2026. More in Structured data

Featured snippet

A highlighted excerpt answering a query above Google's regular results. More in history of AEO

G

GEO (generative engine optimization)

Optimizing content to be visible in generative AI answers; the term comes from a 2023 research paper. More in AEO vs SEO, GEO and LLMO

Google-Extended

A robots.txt token controlling use of content for Gemini training and grounding; it does not affect Google Search. More in Gemini

GPTBot

OpenAI's crawler for model training, separate from OAI-SearchBot. More in ChatGPT search

Grounding

Basing a model's answer on retrieved, current sources rather than training data alone; also called RAG. More in How answer engines work

H

Hallucination

A fluent but false statement produced by a language model. More in Studies & papers

HowTo markup

Schema.org type for step-by-step instructions. Google no longer shows HowTo rich results. More in Structured data

I

IndexNow

An open protocol for notifying participating search engines, including Bing, of added, changed or deleted URLs. More in Freshness

K

Knowledge Graph

Google's database of entities and facts, introduced in 2012 as “things, not strings.” More in Entities & knowledge graphs

Knowledge panel

An information box about an entity in Google results, drawn from the Knowledge Graph. More in Entities & knowledge graphs

L

LLM (large language model)

A neural network trained on large text corpora to predict and generate language. More in How answer engines work

LLMO

LLM optimization: another name for improving visibility in AI assistant answers. More in AEO vs SEO, GEO and LLMO

llms.txt

A proposed Markdown file listing a site's key pages for AI tools; Google Search does not use it. More in llms.txt

LocalBusiness

Schema.org type (with subtypes like Plumber) describing a business with a physical location or service area. More in Local AEO

M

Multimodal search

Search that accepts or returns images, video or voice alongside text. More in Multimodal content

N

NAP

Name, address and phone number: the core local business facts that should match everywhere. More in Local AEO

NOARCHIVE / NOCACHE

Bing directives: NOARCHIVE keeps a page out of Copilot answers; NOCACHE limits use to URL, title and snippet. More in Microsoft Copilot & Bing

noindex

A robots meta tag or header telling search engines not to index a page, which also removes it from AI features. More in AI crawlers & robots.txt

nosnippet

A robots directive preventing text snippets; data-nosnippet excludes parts of a page. Both limit AI feature use. More in Rendering, speed & snippet controls

O

OAI-SearchBot

OpenAI's crawler for ChatGPT search results. More in ChatGPT search

P

People Also Ask

Google's expandable list of related questions with short answers. More in FAQ

PerplexityBot

Perplexity's crawler for its search index; not used for training, per Perplexity. More in Perplexity

Prompt injection

Hidden or embedded text that tries to manipulate an AI system's output; Bing treats it as abuse. More in Citations & mentions

Prompt panel

A fixed set of questions run regularly across AI engines to measure mentions and citations. More in Measuring AI visibility

Q

Query fan-out

An AI search technique that splits one question into several related searches and combines the results. More in How answer engines work

R

RAG (retrieval-augmented generation)

Retrieving relevant documents and generating an answer from them, usually with citations. More in How answer engines work

robots.txt

A file at a site's root telling crawlers which paths they may fetch; standardized as RFC 9309. More in AI crawlers & robots.txt

S

sameAs

A schema.org property listing URLs that identify the same entity, such as official profiles. More in Structured data

Scaled content abuse

Google spam policy against mass-producing pages mainly to manipulate rankings. More in AEO myths

Schema.org

A shared vocabulary for structured data, founded by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex. More in Structured data

Speakable

Beta schema.org markup identifying news text suitable for text-to-speech on Google Assistant. More in Voice assistants

Structured data

Machine-readable markup, usually JSON-LD, describing a page's content and entities. More in Structured data

U

User agent

The name a crawler or browser sends to identify itself, matched by robots.txt rules. More in AI crawlers & robots.txt

W

Wikidata

A free, collaborative knowledge base of structured facts run by the Wikimedia Foundation. More in Entities & knowledge graphs

Z

Zero-click search

A search that ends without a click to any website, often because the answer appeared on the results page. More in Studies & papers

See also

• How answer engines work
• FAQ
• What is AEO?