SEO + GEO Glossary: AI Search Terms

A

ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol): OpenAI and Stripe’s standard behind checkout inside ChatGPT, launched September 2025.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization): Making content easy for AI assistants to quote as a direct answer. Used almost interchangeably with GEO. How we do SEO + GEO
Agentic commerce: AI agents that find, compare and buy products on a shopper’s behalf.
AI agents / agentic search: AI that completes tasks such as booking or buying, not just answering.
AI Assistant channel: Google Analytics 4’s default channel, since May 2026, for visits from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and other assistants.
AI citation: A link to your page shown as a source inside an AI answer.
AI crawlers: Bots AI companies use to fetch pages, such as OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot, PerplexityBot and ClaudeBot. Some fetch for live answers, some for model training. We check AI crawler access in your free report
AI Mode: Google’s conversational search tab for longer questions and follow-ups.
AI Overviews: The AI summary shown above normal Google results.
AI Performance report: A Bing Webmaster Tools report of Copilot citations by query and page.
AI visibility / AI share of voice: How often your brand appears in AI answers for a set of questions, compared with competitors. Tracked in your client dashboard

B

Brand mention: Your brand named on another site, video or forum, with or without a link.
Business Agent: A Google Search feature that lets customers chat with a brand directly in the results.

C

Citation share: Your percentage of all citations shown for one query (a Bing metric).
Core update: A broad change to Google’s ranking systems, released several times a year.

D

Discover core update: A core update for the Google Discover feed only.

E

E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust: what Google’s quality raters look for in content and its creators.
Entity SEO: Making search engines and AI recognise your business as one distinct “thing” with consistent facts everywhere.

G

Generative AI performance report: Search Console’s report of your impressions in AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): Improving how often and how accurately AI engines mention and cite you. Our SEO + GEO services
Grounding / RAG: An AI answer built by retrieving live web pages and summarising them.
Grounding query: The search an AI system actually runs behind a user’s question.

I

INP (Interaction to Next Paint): The Core Web Vital that measures how quickly a page responds to taps and clicks.

L

LLM: Large language model, the technology behind ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude.
LLMO (LLM optimization): Another name for GEO, focused on chat assistants.
llms.txt: A proposed file listing a site’s key pages for AI tools. Google Search ignores it.

M

MCP (Model Context Protocol): An open standard for connecting AI assistants to tools and data.

N

Non-commodity content: Content only you could produce: original data, first-hand experience, expert opinion.

P

Pay Per Crawl: Cloudflare’s program that lets sites charge AI crawlers for access.
Preferred Sources: A Google setting where users pick favourite sites to see more often in Top Stories, AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Q

Query fan-out: Google’s AI splitting one question into many related searches and combining the results.

S

Scaled content abuse: A Google spam policy against mass-producing pages to manipulate rankings, including with AI.
Search Essentials: Google’s rulebook for websites, formerly the Webmaster Guidelines.
Search everywhere optimization: Optimizing for every place people search: Google, AI chats, YouTube, Reddit, marketplaces.
Search Live: Talking to Google Search by voice and phone camera in real time.
Search profiles: Google pages for creators, linked from videos in AI Mode.

U

UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol): Google’s open standard, launched January 2026, for AI agents to find products and check out with merchants.

W

WebMCP: A proposed browser standard from Google and Microsoft that lets websites expose actions to AI agents.

Z

Zero-click search: A search that ends without a click to any website.

SEO + GEO glossary

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