- AEO (answer engine optimization)
- Making a website easy for AI tools to read and describe accurately when they answer a question. It overlaps heavily with good SEO. The difference is where the result shows up: in a written answer rather than a list of links.
- AI crawler
- A program an AI company runs to read websites. Some collect pages to train AI models; others fetch a page at the moment someone asks a question, so the tool can use it in its answer. A website can block them by accident, through its robots.txt file or a firewall setting, and then the blocked tools can’t read it.
- AI Overview
- The AI-written summary Google shows above its regular results for many searches, usually with links to the pages it drew from. Google’s AI Mode is a separate, conversational way to search that works in a similar way.
- AI search
- Getting an answer from an AI tool instead of a list of links. Someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google a question, and the tool writes an answer, sometimes naming businesses and linking to the sources it used.
- Citation
- When an AI tool names or links to a source as part of its answer. For a business, being cited means the tool pointed to its website, or named it, when someone asked a relevant question.
- GEO (generative engine optimization)
- Another name for much the same work as AEO: making sure a business shows up, and is described correctly, in answers written by AI tools. Different people prefer different terms.
- Google Business Profile
- The free listing that shows a business on Google Maps and in Google’s local results, with its hours, photos and reviews. It’s often the first thing people see about a local business on Google.
- llms.txt
- A proposed file that gives AI tools a short, plain-text guide to a website. It’s simple to add, but the major AI tools haven’t confirmed that they use it, so it’s no substitute for clear pages and structured data.
- robots.txt
- A small file at the root of a website that tells crawlers which pages they may read. Well-behaved crawlers follow it, so one wrong line can keep AI tools out of the whole site.
- sameAs
- A line of structured data that lists a business’s other official profiles, such as its Google Business Profile, Yelp page and Instagram account. It helps search engines, and the AI tools that rely on them, see that all of those profiles belong to the same business.
- Schema markup
- The most common kind of structured data, written in a shared vocabulary that Google, Bing and other search engines agree on. One type describes a local business: its name, address, hours and the area it serves.
- SEO (search engine optimization)
- The work of helping a website show up in search engines like Google and Bing. Much of it, such as a clear page for each service and correct business details, also helps with AI search, because several AI tools draw on search engines’ results.
- Structured data
- Code on a web page, invisible to visitors, that states facts in a form machines can read without guessing: a business’s name, address, phone number, hours and services. Search engines use it to understand which business a page is about, and AI tools that draw on search results benefit too.
The AI search glossary for business owners
The terms you’ll hear about how AI tools find and recommend businesses, explained for owners, not developers.
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