AI search dictionary

AEO is editorial and technical work that helps a page answer a specific question clearly and with evidence. The term describes a practice, not a distinct algorithm, file, or schema.org type.

An AI citation is an observable source link or attribution in a particular AI answer. It is an answer-level sample outcome, not a promise that a page will always appear.

AI mention is the observed appearance of an entity in answer text or its structured presentation. It is not a ranking position or proof of a click. A mention, link, citation, and recommendation are separate fields. One answer can contain all four, but none substitutes for another. A nearby source is not necessarily the cause of the wording. It is especially important to separate the displayed mode from assumptions about the internal pipeline.

An AI recommendation is an answer in which a system suggests an entity as suitable for the user’s task. It should be separated from a neutral mention and advertising. A mention, link, citation, and recommendation are separate fields. One answer can contain all four, but none substitutes for another. A nearby source is not necessarily the cause of the wording. It is especially important to separate the displayed mode from assumptions about the internal pipeline.

AI SEO applies durable search principles to surfaces with generative answers: accessibility, indexability, useful content, clear entities, and verifiable sources. Google does not require separate mandatory “AI markup.”

AI visibility is the observed appearance of a brand, page, or entity in an AI-system answer. A mention, recommendation, citation, and referral are different outcomes; one bot visit or one favorable answer does not measure overall visibility.

AIO is a broad, unsettled label for optimization involving AI interfaces. Before using it, state whether it means search, answers, a product feature, advertising, or process automation.

Answer engine is an editorial term for a system that receives a question, retrieves context, and forms an answer. It is not a universal official product class or a guarantee of sources.

Answer model is a working label for the generative part of an answer engine that turns a query and available context into answer text. It does not mean a researcher knows the exact model: an interface may route between models and apply post-processing. Reports should state the known model, mode, and confidence, leaving unknowns unknown.

Content freshness is the degree to which a page reflects the current state of its subject as of a stated date. It requires reviewing changed facts, sources, and limitations; automatically changing dateModified without a substantive revision creates only the appearance of freshness.

A crawler is an automated client that requests URLs for discovery, refresh, or another documented purpose. A matching User-Agent alone is not enough to verify its identity, and a successful request proves only that the server returned a response, not indexing, retrieval, or citation.

An entity is a distinguishable thing about which stable facts and relationships can be represented, such as an organization, person, product, place, or concept. A site should name it consistently and state its relationships explicitly, but that does not guarantee an entry in another system's knowledge graph.

GEO is the practice of making public information accessible, understandable, and verifiable for generative search systems. It is neither an official platform standard nor a way to guarantee a mention or link.

Grounding is the tying of a generated answer to provided or retrieved data that can be used to verify its claims. Strong grounding requires a match between a specific claim and its evidence; a list of links beside an answer does not guarantee that match.

Indexability is the technical eligibility of a URL and its content for inclusion in a particular search engine's index. It requires accessibility and no blocking directives, but it does not guarantee actual indexing, ranking, retrieval, or user visibility.

A knowledge graph is a structure whose nodes represent entities or values and whose edges represent typed relationships. It is a general way to organize knowledge; it is not the same as a Google panel, a JSON-LD file, or a link database, and it does not mean a platform accepted every relationship asserted by a site.

Query fan-out is the decomposition of an original question into several related search subqueries whose results are combined for an answer. Subqueries may explore aspects, entities, or time boundaries; their existence cannot be reliably inferred from a long answer or many links alone.

RAG, or retrieval-augmented generation, is an architecture in which a system first retrieves relevant context from an external corpus and then supplies it to a model for answer generation. RAG does not automatically imply the open web, fresh data, factual accuracy, or visible citations.

Retrieval is the stage at which a system selects documents or passages from an available corpus for further ranking or answer generation. It occurs after content becomes available to the system and is not the same as crawling, indexing, citation, or displaying a link.

robots.txt is a public rule file at /robots.txt where a site owner declares directives for named User-Agents and paths. It governs voluntarily compliant crawling but is not authorization, does not guarantee URL removal from an index, and does not conceal the address.

A search mode is the selected way of processing a query: classic results, an AI answer, a web-enabled chat, or another explicitly named mode. A mention, link, citation, and recommendation are separate fields. One answer can contain all four, but none substitutes for another. A nearby source is not necessarily the cause of the wording. It is especially important to separate the displayed mode from assumptions about the internal pipeline.

A search surface is the specific interface and interaction mode in which a search result is observed: for example, a classic results page, an AI answer, a chat, or a map. One platform can expose several surfaces with different sources and rules. A metric should therefore record the surface, mode, locale, and date instead of saying only ‘visibility in Google.’

A sitemap is a machine-readable list of a site's canonical URLs, commonly XML, that helps a search engine discover and schedule crawling. It may provide a material modification date but guarantees neither crawling, indexing, ranking, nor inclusion in an AI answer.

Source attribution is a visible connection between a claim in an AI answer and a named source, such as a label, source card, or link. It states provenance but does not by itself prove that the source supports every word of the answer.

Structured data is machine-readable markup that explicitly describes the entities, properties, and relationships present in a page's visible content; on the web it is often JSON-LD using schema.org vocabulary. Markup aids interpretation but guarantees neither crawling, indexing, rich results, nor AI citation.