GEO & AI-visibility glossary

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of improving a brand's chances of being accurately mentioned or cited in AI-generated answers.

AI visibility describes how consistently and clearly a brand appears in AI-generated answers for a defined set of questions.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is structuring content so answer engines can easily extract and cite it.

An AI citation is a source reference or link exposed with an AI-generated answer; it is not the same as an unlinked brand mention.

SEO optimizes for ranking in a list of links; GEO optimizes for being named and cited inside an AI-generated answer.

An answer engine is a system or product surface that generates a synthesized response to a query instead of returning only a list of links.

GetCited.me is a GEO and AI-visibility platform for monitoring brand mentions and sources, clarifying look-alike confusion, auditing technical readiness, and turning verified gaps into content and community actions.

AI share of voice estimates a brand's relative presence against tracked competitors in monitored answers.

Mention rate is the percentage of completed monitored answers in which the correct tracked brand was detected.

A brand mention is an answer reference that the analysis can attribute to the monitored brand, with or without a source link.

Sentiment is whether a brand mention in an AI answer is framed positively, neutrally, or negatively.

GetCited.me's AI Visibility Score is a 0–100 composite of monitored answer visibility, share of voice, citation breadth, and mention rate.

The GEO audit readiness score summarizes prioritized technical audit findings on a 0–100 scale.

Question tracking repeats saved questions across selected AI platforms and records how the returned answers change over time.

A topic cluster is a saved group of related monitoring questions managed and scheduled together.

A citation source is a normalized URL exposed with a tracked AI answer.

llms.txt is a proposed Markdown file that gives compatible AI tools a curated map of a site's important content.

ai.txt is an unsettled family of proposals for publishing machine-readable AI-use preferences or policy.

robots.txt controls which compliant crawlers may fetch specified URL paths; different AI and search uses may rely on different crawler tokens.

Content-Signal is a new robots.txt policy directive for expressing preferences about search indexing, real-time AI input, and model training.

An AI crawler is a bot that fetches web content for an AI product — for search grounding, real-time answers, or model training.

Schema markup is structured data, commonly JSON-LD, that labels entities and page content for systems that choose to consume it.

FAQPage schema labels visible question-and-answer content; it is valid markup but not a confirmed AI-citation or Google AI-feature requirement.

Organization schema is structured data describing a company — name, URL, logo, and sameAs links to its official profiles.

An entity is a distinct, machine-recognizable thing — a company, product, or person — that models track across sources.

Entity disambiguation is the work of making sure AI systems can tell a brand apart from other entities with similar names, so mentions and citations are attributed to the right one.

A deployable artifact is a paste-ready asset — such as Organization JSON-LD, an About or FAQ block, or an llms.txt line — generated to implement a specific GEO or disambiguation fix.

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness — Google's framework for assessing content and source quality.

Crawlability is how easily bots, including AI crawlers, can access and parse a site's content.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is when an AI model fetches relevant documents at answer time and grounds its response in them.

Google AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries shown above traditional results for many search queries.

Google AI Mode is Google's full generative-search experience that answers conversationally inside Search.

A sitemap is an XML file listing a site's URLs to help crawlers discover and index them.

Grounding is anchoring an AI answer in retrieved, verifiable sources rather than the model's memory alone.

A content brief is a structured spec — target question, headings, sources, links, and schema — that guides creation of a page built to be cited.

A comparison page answers a head-to-head buyer question such as "X vs Y" with specific, verifiable differences.

An alternatives page helps readers evaluate options beyond a known product for a specific use case.

Citation-ready content is accurate, accessible content whose claims, structure, and sources are easy to inspect and reuse.

Digital PR for GEO is the practice of earning accurate third-party coverage on sources relevant to a brand's audience and monitored answer set.

Community answers are helpful, on-topic contributions to public discussions (Reddit, Stack Overflow, Hacker News) where a brand can be mentioned when genuinely relevant — a source type AI assistants frequently cite.

Competitor tracking compares how often saved and detected rival brands appear across the same monitored answer set.