GEO · Generative Engine Optimization
GEO glossary
The terms we use to measure and improve what ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and other AI assistants say about a brand, explained plainly.
Concepts
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
- The work of getting AI assistants to mention, recommend and cite a brand when someone asks about its market. It is to AI assistants what SEO is to search engines, and shares much of the same technical groundwork.
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
- Another name for much the same thing: optimising for engines that give an answer rather than a list of links. GEO and AEO are often used interchangeably.
- Answer engine
- A service that replies with a written answer instead of ten links: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot or Google's AI answers.
- LLM (large language model)
- The model that writes the answer. What it knows comes from two places: what it learnt during training, and what it looks up on the web at the moment of answering, if search is switched on.
- Web search and grounding
- When the assistant searches the web before answering and bases its answer on those pages, which it usually cites. It is how a website can shape today's answer without waiting for a new round of training.
- AI Overviews and AI Mode
- The AI-generated answers Google shows above its search results (AI Overviews) and its conversational search mode (AI Mode). Both draw on Google's regular index.
- Entity
- A specific, identifiable thing, such as a company, a person or a product, with its attributes: name, website, sector or location. Models understand a brand better when that information is consistent everywhere.
- Hallucination
- Something the model states with confidence that is false: a price, an address or a service that does not exist. Spotting them and fixing the sources they come from is part of GEO work.
Metrics
- Prompt or tracked question
- A real question a customer would ask (“Which management software would you recommend for a garage?”), sent to the engines again and again to measure what they answer.
- Visibility
- Of all the answers measured, the percentage that mention your brand. It is the baseline GEO metric.
- Recommendation rate
- The percentage of answers that put you forward as an option or as the answer, rather than just naming you in passing. Being mentioned is not the same as being recommended.
- Position
- Where you appear when the answer names several brands. Coming first counts for more than coming last on the list.
- Citation or source
- A page the assistant links to or relies on to answer. Knowing which sources get cited in your market tells you where you need to be.
- Answer gap
- A question where a competitor appears and you do not. Every gap is a concrete opportunity for content or for presence in the sources.
- Sample and confidence interval
- AI answers vary from one time to the next, so a figure is only worth something if it says how many answers it is based on. With few answers, the margin of error is wide.
Technical
- AI crawler
- The bot each AI company uses to read the web. Some are for training models (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot), some for their search engine (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot) and some for opening a page when a user asks (ChatGPT-User). The search ones decide whether you can be cited today.
- robots.txt
- The file that tells each crawler what it may read on a website. Be careful: a CDN or firewall can block a bot that robots.txt allows, and then the block is what counts.
- Structured data (JSON-LD)
- Information about the page written in a format machines read without ambiguity, using the schema.org vocabulary: who the company is, what it sells, where it is. It helps search engines understand the entity.
- llms.txt
- A proposed text file that summarises a website for language models. It is cheap to add, but no major engine has confirmed using it so far; on its own it is not a lever for visibility.
- Server-side rendering
- The page's text arrives already written in the HTML. Many AI crawlers do not run JavaScript, so anything that only appears after running it does not exist for them.
Does AI name you when people ask about what you do?
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