GEO Glossary
Essential terminology for understanding Generative Engine Optimization and the age of AI search.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
The practice of ensuring that a brand, product, or organization is correctly understood, accurately represented, and favorably recommended by AI-powered answer engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.
Answer Engine
An AI-powered search system that provides direct answers to user queries rather than a list of blue links. Examples include Perplexity, ChatGPT Search, and Google Gemini.
Share of AI Voice
A metric that measures how often a brand appears in AI-generated answers compared to competitors for a specific set of prompts or topics. It reflects relative visibility within AI responses.
Zero-Click Search
A search behavior where the user's query is answered directly on the search results page or by an AI tool, eliminating the need to click through to a website.
Entity Optimization
The process of structuring data and content to help AI models clearly identify and understand distinct entities (brands, people, products) and their relationships.
Trust Signals
Indicators that AI models use to evaluate the credibility of information. These include consistent citations, structured data, authoritative backlinks, and sentiment alignment across sources.
Hallucination
A phenomenon where an AI model generates incorrect or nonsensical information confidently. GEO aims to reduce hallucinations about brands by providing clear, verifiable data.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
A technique used by AI systems to retrieve relevant facts from external sources (like the web) to ground their generated answers in reality and reduce hallucinations.
Citation Frequency
The number of times an AI engine links to or references a specific source or brand as verification for its claims.
LLM (Large Language Model)
A deep learning algorithm that can recognize, summarize, translate, predict, and generate text and other content based on knowledge gained from massive datasets.
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