AI Search & GEO

AEO (answer engine optimization) describes measures that aim to make content appear as an answer in AI-based systems such as ChatGPT …

AI content detection means methods and tools that try to estimate whether a text, image or video was generated by an AI.

AI sentiment in the SEO and GEO sense is the tone with which an AI system describes a brand, product or person in its answers, for example …

AI SEO is a loose term with two common meanings.

Brand signals in branding means the elements that make a brand recognizable, such as name, logo and colors.

Citability in generative engine optimization (GEO) describes how likely it is that a passage of content is selected and cited by an AI …

A GEO audit is a review of whether and how a website appears in answers from AI systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Google AI Overviews …

GEO (generative engine optimization) is the practice of making content more likely to appear in answers from generative AI systems such as …

Agentic search is a search approach in which an AI agent decides when to search, writes the queries, reads the results and, if needed …

An AI agent is a system in which a language model decides on its own which steps and tools to use to reach a goal.

An AI chatbot is software that holds conversations with people and answers their input automatically.

AI Mode is a search experience in Google Search that answers questions with an AI-generated response in a conversational view, alongside …

AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that Google Search shows above the regular results for some queries.

AI search refers to search systems that answer a query with text generated by a language model and link to the web sources the answer …

AI snippet is an informal SEO label for the text that Google shows from a page inside its AI answers, or for the AI-written summary itself.

An answer engine is a search system that responds to a question with a written answer and source links, instead of putting a list of …

Circle to Search is a Google feature for Android phones that searches for anything on the screen without leaving the current app.

Conversational search is a form of search in which users ask in natural language and can follow up, while the system keeps the earlier …

Deep research is a feature of AI assistants that investigates a topic across many web sources in several steps and returns a longer report …

A direct answer, also called an answer box, is in SEO a result element that answers a question directly on the results page or inside an …

Google Lens is Google's visual search.

Multimodal search is search that accepts and combines more than one type of input, for example a photo and a text question.

Preferred sources is a Google Search feature that lets signed-in users pick the news sites they want to see more often.

Voice search is a search where the query is spoken instead of typed.

An AI brand mention occurs when an AI system such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity names a brand in the text of its answer.

An AI citation is a source reference in an answer from an AI system, usually a link or footnote to the web page a statement came from.

AI share of voice, often called share of model, measures how often a brand appears in answers from AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini …

AI visibility describes how often and in what way a brand, product or website appears in answers from AI systems such as ChatGPT …

AI visibility tracking measures how often and in which context a brand or domain appears in answers from AI systems, either as a name in …

In AI use, a prompt is the text input a user gives an AI model to get a response.

Prompt tracking is the regular running of defined prompts on AI systems and the evaluation of the answers for brand mentions, linked …

Prompt volume is an estimate of how many prompts people send to AI assistants such as ChatGPT about a topic.

An AI hallucination is an output from a language model that sounds plausible but is false, irrelevant or invented.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a broad term for computer systems that handle tasks which normally call for human intelligence, such as …

The context window is all the text a language model can reference when it generates a response, including the response itself.

Vector embeddings are lists of numbers that represent data such as words, sentences, documents, images or audio as points in a vector space.

Fine-tuning in AI means continuing the training of an already pretrained model on additional, task-specific examples.

Generative AI refers to AI models that create new content such as text, images, audio, video or code.

The knowledge cutoff is the point in time up to which a language model has been trained on data.

A large language model (LLM) is an AI model trained on very large amounts of text that generates language by repeatedly predicting the …

A system prompt is the standing instruction that a developer or operator gives a language model before the user's own input.

A token in the context of language models is the unit of text a model reads and writes.

A tokenizer is the component that splits text into tokens and assigns each token a numeric ID from a fixed vocabulary.

Training data is the collection of examples a machine learning model learns from.

A transformer is a neural network architecture that processes text and other sequences with an attention mechanism, called self-attention.

Chunking, in the context of AI search, means splitting long documents into smaller passages, called chunks, that a system stores, searches …

Grounding in AI means tying a language model's answer to external, checkable sources instead of relying on training data alone.

A grounding page is a web page that states verifiable facts about one entity, such as a company, person or product, in plain language and …

Grounding with Google Search is a tool in the Gemini API.

LLM web search is a tool function that lets a large language model run web searches while it answers a request, read the results, and cite …

Query fan-out is a technique used in AI search in which the system breaks one question into several related sub-queries and runs them at …

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a method in which a language model retrieves relevant information from an external source before …

A vector database stores embeddings, the number vectors that represent the meaning of text, images or audio, and retrieves the entries …

Vector search finds similar items by representing text, images or audio as vectors, called embeddings, and comparing the distance between …

AI opt-out here means the ways a website can limit how Google's generative search features use its content, which are AI Overviews and AI …

ai.txt is a proposed file name for a text file in which website operators state how AI systems may use their content.

The Content Signals Policy is a robots.txt extension that lets a site state what crawlers may do with its content after fetching it.

The EU AI Act is Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, the European Union's rules for artificial intelligence.

Google-Extended is a robots.txt product token that lets site owners control whether content Google has crawled may be used for training …

llms-full.txt is a file that makes the complete text of a website or documentation available in one Markdown document.

llms.txt is a proposed Markdown file at the root of a website (/llms.txt) that gives language models and AI agents a short, curated …

A Markdown version for LLMs is a second, leaner version of a page in Markdown that AI agents and language models can request instead of …

A TDM reservation is a rights holder's declaration that third parties may not use their content for text and data mining (TDM).