Glossary.
The terms that come up most often in modern search and AI visibility work, defined briefly. Useful before a strategy call, or as a reference when reading the blog.
Plain-English definitions.
- AI Search
Search behaviour where the user asks an AI system (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews) a question and receives a synthesised answer instead of a list of links. Most early-stage research questions now happen in AI search before the user ever clicks through to a website.
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
The practice of optimising a website's content, structure, and entity signals so that generative AI engines cite it when answering relevant queries. GEO overlaps heavily with traditional SEO but adds requirements around quotable answers, entity disambiguation, and citation-friendly content patterns.
- Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Optimising for answer engines specifically (ChatGPT, Perplexity, You.com, etc.) rather than traditional search engines. In practice AEO and GEO are now used interchangeably and overlap with modern SEO.
- AI Overviews
Google's generative-AI answer block that appears above traditional organic results for many queries. AI Overviews cite source pages but most users read the synthesised answer without clicking through. Appearing as a cited source in AI Overviews is now a primary visibility goal for content sites.
- Entity signals
Machine-readable data that helps search and AI engines understand who a person, company, or product is, and how they relate to other entities in their knowledge graph. Examples: Person schema, Organization schema, consistent name-address-phone (NAP) across the web, and sameAs links pointing at verified profiles (LinkedIn, Crunchbase, etc.).
- Person schema
A type of JSON-LD structured data that describes a person to search engines and AI crawlers. Critical fields: name, jobTitle, sameAs (links to verified profiles), description, knowsAbout. Person schema is a primary input to how AI engines describe a consultant or author when asked.
- Organization schema
JSON-LD structured data that describes a business entity. Critical fields: name, url, founder (linked to Person schema where relevant), areaServed, description. Together with Person schema, Organization schema forms the spine of how AI engines understand a company.
- Citation
In AI search, a citation is the source a generative engine attributes when answering a query. Being cited (versus just ranked) is the new measure of visibility: citations drive both attribution and trust signals back to the source domain.
- Query reformulation
The process where an AI engine silently rewrites a user's query before searching, sometimes into multiple sub-queries, sometimes into a semantically related but lexically different phrase. Means traditional keyword targeting is no longer enough: pages must be associated with the topic the engine reformulates toward, not just the exact phrase users type.
- Topic cluster
A content structure where one comprehensive pillar page covers a broad topic and several supporting pages cover narrower sub-topics, all internally linked to the pillar. Modern AI engines reward sites that establish topical authority through clusters more than sites with isolated high-ranking pages.