AI Search Glossary: Core Terms and Abbreviations

The AI search world is full of abbreviations and terms. This glossary defines the concepts you’ll encounter most often in a plain and clear way. Each term links to the relevant detailed article.

Core concepts

SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Work done to get pages found and ranked in search engines. Detail

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): Work done to get a brand mentioned and cited in AI answers. Detail

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization): Structuring content to be a direct answer to a question. Detail

AI search: A form of search that produces direct, compiled answers to questions. Detail

Visibility and measurement

Mention: A brand appearing by name in an AI answer.

Citation: A site being shown as the source of an answer. Detail

Share of Answer: A brand’s total visibility in AI answers compared to competitors. Detail

AI Overviews: The compiled answer Google shows at the top of search results. Detail

Zero-click: The user seeing the answer directly and not clicking any link.

Content and authority

Entity (brand identity): The consistent definition of who a brand is and what it does.

E-E-A-T: Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. The foundation of content quality. Detail

Topic cluster: An authority structure built with a main page and supporting content. Detail

Brand mention: A brand being mentioned, with or without a link. Detail

Technical terms

Crawl budget: The amount of pages bots will crawl on a site. Detail

Core Web Vitals: The LCP, INP and CLS metrics that measure page experience. Detail

Structured data (schema): Marking up content in a machine-readable way. Detail

hreflang: The tag that indicates the correct language/region version on multilingual sites. Detail

NAP: A business’s name, address and phone; its consistency is critical for local visibility. Detail

Summary

This glossary brings together the core terms of the AI search world. Understanding the terms is the first step to making the right decisions. To see where your brand stands among these concepts, you can use the visibility analysis.