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
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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)
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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)
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.