AEO glossary
The vocabulary, without the padding.
This field renames things constantly. Here is what the words mean in practice, and which ones are worth caring about.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| AEO | Answer Engine Optimisation — being the source an assistant quotes when it answers a question. |
| GEO | Generative Engine Optimisation. The same thing as AEO; both names are in use and neither has won. |
| Citation | An assistant naming or linking you in an answer. The unit of success here, in place of a ranking. |
| Answer engine | Anything that answers instead of listing links: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews. |
| RAG | Retrieval-augmented generation — the model fetches documents, then writes from them. Why extractable structure matters so much. |
| Chunking | How a retrieval system splits your page. Clean headings mean clean chunks; a wall of text splits badly. |
| Extractability | How easily a self-contained answer can be lifted from your page. The practical goal of every structural rule. |
| Structured data | Schema markup — machine-readable facts about the page. How you hand an engine a parsed answer instead of hoping. |
| E-E-A-T | Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust. Google’s quality framing; a useful checklist even though it is not a score. |
| Prompt volume | How often a question is asked of assistants. The AEO equivalent of search volume, and far less precisely measurable. |
| Zero-click | The question was answered without anyone visiting a site. Increasingly the normal outcome, which is the whole reason citations matter. |
| Share of voice | How often you are named across your tracked prompts, versus competitors. |
| llms.txt | A proposed file describing your site for language models. Cheap to add, not yet widely honoured. |
| IndexNow | A protocol for telling search engines about new URLs immediately. Bing supports it, and Bing feeds ChatGPT’s search. |
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