Glossary
Plain definitions of the terms you’ll meet in AI search, one page each.
- AEO (answer engine optimisation)
- AEO, or answer engine optimisation, is the work of making a brand easier for AI answer engines such as ChatGPT to find, understand and name when buyers ask questions.
- AI citation
- An AI citation is a link an AI answer shows to a web page it used, marking that page as a source for what the answer says.
- AI visibility
- AI visibility describes whether, and how, AI answer engines name, describe and cite a brand when people ask questions in its category.
- Answer engine
- An answer engine is a service that replies to a question with a written answer, often citing its sources, instead of returning a list of links.
- Bing Webmaster Tools
- Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft's free service for site owners to verify a website, submit sitemaps and see how Bing crawls and indexes it.
- Brand mention
- A brand mention is an AI answer naming a brand in its text, whether or not the answer links to that brand's website.
- ChatGPT-User
- ChatGPT-User is the user agent OpenAI uses when ChatGPT or a custom GPT visits a web page because a person's request needs it.
- GEO (generative engine optimisation)
- GEO, or generative engine optimisation, is a term from a 2023 research paper for adapting content so generative AI answers are more likely to show and cite it.
- GPTBot
- GPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler for collecting content that may be used to train its generative AI foundation models.
- IndexNow
- IndexNow is an open protocol that lets a website notify participating search engines, including Bing, as soon as a page is added, updated or deleted.
- llms.txt
- llms.txt is a proposed Markdown file at a website's root that lists the site's key pages and summaries for large language models to read.
- OAI-SearchBot
- OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's web crawler for ChatGPT's search features; sites that block it in robots.txt are left out of ChatGPT search answers.
- Structured data (JSON-LD)
- Structured data is standardised code on a page, usually JSON-LD using schema.org terms, that tells machines what the page is about and how to classify it.
- Training cutoff
- A training cutoff is the date after which a model has no information from its training data; anything newer reaches it only through web search.
- Web search (grounding)
- Web search, or grounding, is when an AI model searches the web while answering and builds its reply from the pages it finds, usually citing them.
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