Reference
GEO Glossary
The vocabulary of generative engine optimization, defined plainly. Updated as the field evolves.
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
- The practice of optimizing a brand's web presence so that large language models and AI search engines retrieve, summarize, and recommend it accurately.
- AI Visibility Score
- A composite metric measuring how frequently and favorably AI systems mention a brand for buyer-intent prompts in its category.
- Prompt Probe
- A standardized query sent to an AI model to test how it describes or ranks a brand, product, or category.
- llms.txt
- A proposed plain-text file at the root of a domain that gives LLM crawlers a curated map of the most important content on a site.
- Structured Data (JSON-LD)
- Machine-readable metadata embedded in a webpage using Schema.org vocabulary that helps both search engines and AI models understand entities, products, and relationships.
- Citation Source
- A third-party page (review site, publication, community thread) that AI models cite when describing a brand. Citation diversity strongly influences how confidently a model recommends a brand.
- Hallucination
- When an AI model fabricates a factual claim about a brand — for example, inventing a feature, price, or founder. Reducing hallucinations is a core goal of GEO.
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
- An architecture where an AI model retrieves documents in real time and grounds its answer in them, instead of relying solely on training data.
- Crawl Surface
- The set of pages, feeds, and APIs that automated agents — including AI crawlers — can reach on a given domain.
- Entity
- A distinct concept (company, product, person, place) that AI systems track across the web. Strong entity definition is the foundation of GEO.