SEO and GEO terms, explained briefly and accurately.

GEO is the practice of getting your brand mentioned, and your pages cited, in AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI features. It doesn’t replace SEO; it builds on crawlable, clear and trustworthy pages.

AEO is optimizing content to be used in direct answers to questions: voice assistants, featured snippets and AI-generated answers. Today the term is mostly used interchangeably with GEO.

AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries Google shows above the results for some searches. They link to web pages as sources and draw on the regular search index.

AI Mode is the conversational AI experience in Google Search. Users can ask follow-up questions, and answers link to web pages much like AI Overviews.

A large language model is an AI model trained on vast amounts of text that can generate text. ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are built on LLMs.

A citation is a link in an AI answer to the page the information came from. It’s the only way an AI answer sends you visitors.

A mention is your brand name appearing in an AI answer. Without a link it won’t bring visits, but it shows whether your brand comes to mind.

Share of voice is your brand’s mentions divided by the total mentions of all brands across answers to a set of questions. It shows how visible you are relative to competitors.

AI visibility is how often your brand is mentioned and your pages are cited in AI answers. Search Console doesn’t report it separately; you measure it by asking the same questions on a schedule.

llms.txt is a proposed Markdown file at the site root that gives AI tools a summary of the site and its key pages. It isn’t a standard, and the major platforms haven’t officially said they use it.

AI crawlers are the bots AI companies use to fetch web pages. Some collect content for model training (GPTBot, ClaudeBot); others build the search results used in answers (OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot).

SEO is the technical, content and link work that helps search engines like Google find a site, understand it correctly and rank it for relevant searches.

Search Console is Google’s free tool for site owners. It shows which queries your site appears for, how many impressions and clicks it gets, its average position and any indexing problems.

An impression is counted when your page appears in a search result shown to a user. The user doesn’t have to scroll to it or click it; being on the results page is enough.

Click-through rate is clicks divided by impressions. High impressions with a low CTR often mean the title or description doesn’t match what the searcher wants.

Average position is the mean of your page’s topmost position in search results, as reported in Search Console. Because it’s an average, it may not match your actual rank for any single query.

A keyword is a word or phrase people type into a search engine. It’s used to decide which searches a page should answer.

Search volume is an estimate of how many times a keyword is searched per month in a given country. It isn’t exact; use it to compare keywords with each other.

Search intent is what the searcher wants to accomplish: learn something, compare options, reach a specific site or buy. A page that ranks but doesn’t match the intent won’t convert.

The SERP is the page of results shown for a search. Besides the blue links, it can include AI Overviews, shopping results, images and “People also ask” boxes.

Keyword cannibalization happens when several pages on the same site target the same search and compete with each other. The usual fix is to merge them or give each a distinct intent.

Crawling is search engine bots following links to visit your pages and read their content. A page that can’t be crawled can’t be indexed.

Indexing is the search engine storing a crawled page in its database. Only indexed pages can appear in search results and in Google’s AI answers.

robots.txt is a text file at the site root that tells bots which paths they may crawl. It manages crawling; it is not the way to remove a page from the index.

noindex is a meta tag or HTTP header that asks search engines not to show a page in results. Adding it to an important page by mistake is one of the most common serious technical errors.

A canonical tag tells search engines which of several near-duplicate pages is the main version. It matters most for filtered category pages and URLs with parameters.

Structured data marks up information such as products, prices, articles or organizations using the schema.org vocabulary so machines can read it. It’s usually added as JSON-LD.

Core Web Vitals are the three metrics Google uses to measure page experience: loading speed (LCP), responsiveness to interaction (INP) and visual stability (CLS).

A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Links from relevant, trustworthy sites signal to search engines that your site can be trusted.

E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. It’s a framework from Google’s search quality rater guidelines, not a ranking score on its own.