New to AI search optimization? This glossary covers the key terms you'll encounter in AI Rankia and the industry.
Core concepts
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) — optimizing your content to appear in AI-generated answers. The AI-era equivalent of SEO: instead of ranking in a list of links, you optimize to be mentioned or cited when AI generates an answer.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) — often used interchangeably with GEO. Some use AEO for featured snippets and direct answers, and GEO for the broader AI search landscape.
AI Search — any search experience powered by a large language model: ChatGPT web search, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Claude and others.
LLM (Large Language Model) — the AI model that generates responses (GPT-5, Claude, Gemini, Llama, DeepSeek). These power AI search engines.
Visibility terms
Brand mention — when an AI includes your brand name in its answer.
Citation — when an AI references a URL from your site as a source. Citations can drive referral traffic.
Share of Voice — the share of AI answers in your space that mention your brand versus competitors.
Query Fan-Out — when an AI breaks a single question into several sub-questions to gather information before answering. Understanding fan-out shapes your content strategy.
AI search engines
Google AI Overviews — AI summaries at the top of Google results for a large share of queries.
Google AI Mode — Google's dedicated AI search experience, where the whole results page is AI-generated.
Perplexity — an AI-first search engine that always cites its sources.
Native vs non-native engines — native engines run their own live web search (the most realistic results); non-native engines answer from training data. AI Rankia tracks both.
Technical terms
Schema markup — structured data (JSON-LD) added to your HTML that helps AI understand your content. Uses Schema.org vocabulary.
llms.txt — a file at your site's root (like robots.txt) that gives AI a summary of your site. An emerging standard.
robots.txt — tells crawlers which pages they can access. Blocking AI crawlers prevents those engines from citing you.
E-E-A-T — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. A quality framework AI uses to decide which sources to trust.
AI Rankia terms
Credits — the currency powering AI Rankia's tools. Each action costs a number of credits based on what it does. See Credits & Billing ▸ How Credits Work.
Scheduled prompts — prompts set up for recurring automated monitoring, weekly or daily.