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The AI search glossary
Short, plain-English definitions of the words you meet when you try to get found in Google and AI answers.
A
- Glossary
AI citation
An AI citation is a source an AI tool links to or names to support its answer. Perplexity, ChatGPT search, Gemini and Google AI Overviews often show these as links, numbered footnotes or source cards. Being cited means your page helped shape the answer. It also gives the reader a direct path to your site.
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AI crawlers
AI crawlers are automated programs that AI companies use to fetch web pages. Some collect training data, and some build search indexes for AI answers. Others fetch a page when a user asks. Each has its own user-agent name, so you can allow or block them separately in your robots.txt file.
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AI hallucination
An AI hallucination is when an AI system states something false or made up as if it were true. For a business, that might be a wrong price, an old address or a service you never offered. It happens because language models predict likely text rather than check facts. You cannot edit AI answers directly, but you can fix the sources they rely on.
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AI Overviews
AI Overviews are short, AI-generated summaries that Google shows at the top of some search results. They answer the query directly and link to the web pages they drew from. Google says no special markup is needed to appear in them. Pages must be indexed and eligible to show a snippet, and normal SEO best practice applies.
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AI search visibility
AI search visibility is how often, and how well, your brand appears in AI-generated answers. Think of ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. It covers whether you are mentioned and whether your site is cited as a source. It also covers how you are described, and how you compare with competitors on the same buyer questions.
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AI share of voice
AI share of voice is the portion of AI answers in your market that mention your brand versus competitors. You calculate it from a fixed set of buyer prompts asked on ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and similar tools. If your brand appears in more of those answers than your rivals, your share of voice is higher.
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Answer engine optimization
Answer engine optimization (AEO) means writing content that search engines and AI assistants can quote as a direct answer. It began with featured snippets and voice assistants. Today it also covers AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity. These tools answer in full sentences and often name the sources they used.
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B
- Glossary
Backlink
A backlink is a link from another website to a page on your site. Search engines treat relevant links from trusted sites as a sign that your content is worth finding. Backlinks also help crawlers discover your pages and can send visitors directly. Quality and relevance matter far more than the number of links.
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Brand mention
A brand mention is any place your business name appears, with or without a link. On the web, that includes articles, reviews, directories and forums. In AI search, it means your name appearing inside a generated answer. Both matter, because AI systems build their picture of a brand partly from where and how it is mentioned.
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Buyer prompt
A buyer prompt is a question a potential customer asks an AI tool while choosing a product or service. Examples include “best CRM for a small agency” or “emergency plumber near me open now.” Tracking a set of buyer prompts shows whether AI answers recommend you. These are the moments that lead to a sale.
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C
- Glossary
Canonical URL
A canonical URL is the main version of a page that you want search engines to index and show. When the same content lives at several addresses, a canonical tag points to the preferred one. Google treats it as a strong hint, not a command. It weighs your tag alongside redirects, internal links and sitemaps before choosing.
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Citation gap
A citation gap is the set of sources that mention or cite your competitors but not you. In AI search, it usually means the sites AI answers rely on for your buyers' questions. Closing the gap means earning a fair listing, review or reference on those sources. Then AI tools can find your brand there too.
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ClaudeBot
ClaudeBot is Anthropic's web crawler for collecting public content that may be used to train its Claude AI models. Anthropic also runs Claude-SearchBot, which supports search results in Claude, and Claude-User, which fetches pages when a user asks. Each one can be allowed or blocked separately in your robots.txt file.
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Click-through rate
Click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who click your result after seeing it. You calculate it by dividing clicks by impressions and multiplying by 100. In search, CTR shows how well your listing earns the click at its position. AI Overviews and other answer features can lower CTR even when rankings hold steady.
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E
- Glossary
E-E-A-T
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. It comes from Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines, which human reviewers use to judge result quality. It is not a single ranking score. It describes what Google's systems aim to reward. Trust is the center of it, and the other three support it.
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Entity SEO
Entity SEO helps search engines and AI systems understand your brand as one distinct, well-described thing. An entity is anything uniquely identifiable, such as a company, person, place or product. The goal is that machines know who you are, what you do and how you connect to other things. Consistency across the web is the core of it.
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G
- Glossary
Generative engine optimization
Generative engine optimization (GEO) means making your brand easy for AI tools to find, understand and recommend. It covers your own website, the third-party sources AI systems trust, and how you measure mentions and citations. The goal is to appear when ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI features answer your buyers' questions.
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Google-Extended
Google-Extended is a robots.txt control token, not a separate crawler. It lets you tell Google not to use your content for training Gemini models or for grounding Gemini answers. It does not affect Google Search, your rankings or Google AI Overviews. Those rely on Googlebot and normal Search controls.
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GPTBot
GPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler for collecting content that may be used to train its AI models. It is separate from OAI-SearchBot, which builds the index for ChatGPT search. ChatGPT-User is separate too; it fetches pages when a user asks. Blocking GPTBot does not remove your site from ChatGPT search results.
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K
L
- Glossary
Large language model
A large language model (LLM) is an AI system trained on vast text collections to read and write language. It works by predicting the next piece of text, one small step at a time. LLMs power assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. They know about your business from training data, live web retrieval, or both.
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llms.txt
llms.txt is a proposed standard for a plain Markdown file at the root of your site, at /llms.txt. It gives AI tools a short summary of your business and links to your most useful pages. It was proposed in 2024. At the time of writing, no major AI platform has confirmed that it uses the file.
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O
P
- Glossary
PerplexityBot
PerplexityBot is the crawler Perplexity uses to find and index web pages for its AI answer engine. Perplexity says it is not used to train AI foundation models. A second agent, Perplexity-User, fetches pages when a user asks a question. If PerplexityBot cannot reach your site, Perplexity is less likely to cite it.
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Prompt tracking
Prompt tracking means asking the same buyer questions on AI platforms on a schedule, and recording the answers. Each run notes which brands are mentioned, which sources are cited and how your brand is described. Over time, this shows whether your AI search visibility is rising or falling against competitors.
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R
- Glossary
Referring domain
A referring domain is a separate website that links to your site at least once. If one site links to you fifty times, that counts as fifty backlinks but only one referring domain. Counting domains shows how many independent sites vouch for you. The relevance and quality of those sites matter more than the raw number.
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Retrieval-augmented generation
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a method where an AI system looks up relevant documents before writing its answer. It retrieves passages from an index or the web and adds them to the prompt. Then it writes a reply based on them. AI search tools use forms of it. That retrieval step is where your web pages can be found, used and cited.
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robots.txt
robots.txt is a plain text file at your site's root that tells crawlers which pages they may fetch. Search engines and most AI companies follow it voluntarily. It controls crawling, not indexing or security. For AI search, it decides which AI bots can read your pages and later cite them.
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S
- Glossary
Sentiment in AI answers
Sentiment in AI answers is the tone and framing an AI assistant uses when it mentions your brand. It can be positive, neutral or negative. It also covers context, such as being called the budget option or known for slow support. Two brands can be mentioned equally often while one is recommended and the other is warned against.
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Server-side rendering
Server-side rendering (SSR) means the server builds a page's full HTML before sending it to the browser. Visitors and crawlers receive the finished content in the first response. The alternative, client-side rendering, sends a near-empty page and builds it with JavaScript. SSR matters because many AI crawlers appear not to run JavaScript, so they only see what the server sends.
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Structured data
Structured data is code that labels the facts on a page in a standard format. Machines can then read them without guessing. It usually uses the schema.org vocabulary, written as JSON-LD. It can describe your organization, products, prices, reviews and FAQs. Search engines use it for rich results and to understand pages.
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Z
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