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Glossary

The language ofAI search, defined.

Clear, useful definitions for how AI search actually works — and how brands earn a mention inside the answer. Maintained by the team at PageLens.ai, updated as the engines change.

Foundations

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Answer Engine OptimizationAEO

The practice of getting your brand named, quoted, and cited inside the answers AI engines give buyers — rather than ranking a link they may never click.

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Generative Engine OptimizationGEO

Optimizing your content so large language models retrieve and weave it into the answers they generate, and attribute those answers to you.

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AI SEO

The discipline of earning visibility across AI-driven search — from Google's AI Overviews to ChatGPT and Perplexity — as answer engines replace the ranked list of links.

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AI Search

Search that returns a synthesized, conversational answer built from multiple sources, instead of a ranked list of links for you to click through.

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LLM SEO

Optimizing your content and brand so large language models surface and recommend you — SEO aimed at ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude rather than Google's link list.

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Search Everywhere Optimization

A strategy that optimizes for every place buyers now search — AI engines, social platforms, marketplaces and YouTube — not just Google.

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GEO vs SEO

How Generative Engine Optimization differs from traditional SEO: being cited inside an AI answer versus ranking a link in a list.

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AI Search Optimization

Optimizing your content and brand to be surfaced and cited in AI-generated search results, across engines like Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity.

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AI Optimization

A broad term for optimizing your content and brand to perform well in AI systems — most often shorthand for getting surfaced and cited by AI search.

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LLM OptimizationLLMO

Large Language Model Optimization — shaping your content so LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude surface and recommend you; a synonym for GEO and AEO.

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AI answer engines

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AI Overviews

Google's AI-generated answer that appears above the classic search results, summarizing multiple sources and linking to only a few of them.

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Google AI Mode

Google Search's conversational, AI-first mode that answers a query by fanning it out into sub-questions and synthesizing one cited response.

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ChatGPT Search

ChatGPT's ability to browse the live web and answer with current information and cited sources — turning the chatbot into a search engine.

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Bing Copilot

Microsoft's AI assistant, built into Bing and Windows, that answers questions with a synthesized response and cited web sources, powered by OpenAI models.

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Perplexity AI

An AI-native answer engine that responds to questions with a concise, cited summary of live web sources instead of a list of links.

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SearchGPT

OpenAI's search experience — the prototype that became ChatGPT Search — that answers queries with real-time, cited information from the web.

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Search Generative ExperienceSGE

Google's experimental AI search project that generated answers at the top of results; it graduated into the launched AI Overviews.

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Zero-Click Search

A search where the user gets their answer directly on the results page — from a snippet or AI answer — without clicking through to any website.

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Conversational Search

Search as a back-and-forth dialogue — you ask, refine and follow up while the system keeps context — instead of firing off separate keyword queries.

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How AI reads content

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Large Language ModelLLM

An AI model trained on vast amounts of text to predict the next token, which lets it understand and generate human-like language.

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Retrieval-Augmented GenerationRAG

A technique where a model retrieves relevant documents before answering, grounding its response in real sources instead of memory alone.

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Prompt Engineering

The practice of shaping the input to a language model — its role, context, task and constraints — to get more accurate and reliable output.

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llms.txt

A proposed plain-text standard that tells AI crawlers which of your pages matter and how to read them — like robots.txt, but for large language models.

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Knowledge Graph

A structured network of entities — people, places, brands, concepts — and the relationships between them, helping machines understand meaning rather than keywords.

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Semantic Search

Search that interprets the meaning and intent behind a query, matching concepts rather than exact keywords, using embeddings and language understanding.

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Vector Embeddings

Numerical representations of text that place similar meanings close together in space, letting AI systems retrieve content by concept instead of keyword.

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Entity SEO

Optimizing around clearly-defined entities — your brand, products and people — and their relationships, so search and AI understand who you are, not just your words.

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Natural Language Search

Searching in plain, conversational sentences the way you'd ask a person, which AI systems parse for intent instead of matching keywords.

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Schema Markup

Structured-data code, using the Schema.org vocabulary, that labels the meaning of your content so search engines and AI can understand and reuse it.

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Structured Data

Machine-readable labeling of your page's content — often in JSON-LD — that tells search engines and AI what each element means.

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AI Crawlers

Bots operated by AI companies — like GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended — that read the web to train models and to fetch sources for AI answers.

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GPTBot

OpenAI's web crawler, which reads public pages to help train its models; sites can allow or block it in robots.txt.

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Content Chunking

Breaking content into self-contained, well-labeled passages so retrieval systems can pull the exact chunk that answers a question.

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E-E-A-T

Google's framework for content quality — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness — signals that also shape which sources AI engines trust.

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Topical Authority

The depth and breadth of your coverage on a subject, which builds the trust that makes search and AI treat you as a go-to source.

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Measuring AI visibility

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AI Visibility

A measure of how often, and how favorably, AI engines surface your brand when buyers ask questions in your category.

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Share of VoiceSOV

Your slice of the total brand mentions in AI answers for a set of prompts — how the recommendation splits between you and every competitor.

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Brand Mentions

Every time your brand is named across the web and in AI answers — linked or not — a signal of authority that increasingly drives whether AI recommends you.

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AI Citations

The specific sources an AI answer links to or names as the basis for its response — the AI-era equivalent of a ranking, and what earns you the click.

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Brand SERP

The search results page for your own brand name — and, increasingly, what AI says when someone asks about you directly.

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Sentiment Analysis

Using natural-language processing to judge whether text about your brand is positive, negative or neutral — including how AI models describe you in their answers.

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AI Search Visibility

How prominently your brand appears within AI search results — whether the engines name and cite you when buyers ask, and how you compare to rivals.

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Citation Tracking

Monitoring which sources AI engines cite over time — and whether they cite you — so you can tell if your answer-engine optimization is working.

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Adjacent

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AI Marketing

The use of artificial intelligence across marketing — content, personalization, analytics — and, increasingly, marketing to the AI engines that now recommend brands.

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Digital PR

Earning mentions and links from authoritative publications and creators — a core way to build the third-party credibility AI engines trust when they cite sources.

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Featured Snippets

The boxed, direct answer Google pulls to the top of results — 'position zero' — and a frequent source for what AI Overviews then summarize.

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People Also AskPAA

The expanding list of related questions Google shows in results — a live map of how buyers phrase their questions, useful for AEO content.

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Voice Search Optimization

Optimizing for spoken, conversational queries and the single spoken answer assistants give back — an early preview of answer-first search.

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AI SEO Tools

Software that helps you track and improve visibility in AI search — measuring mentions, citations, sentiment and share of voice across engines.

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Programmatic SEO

Generating many pages at scale from a template and a structured dataset to target long-tail queries — powerful, but only when each page carries real, unique value.

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