Glossary

SEO, AEO & GEO glossary

Plain-language definitions for every term in modern search — the kind AI engines like to cite.

AllGEOAEOAI SearchTechnical SEOContent Automation
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A

AI Search

AI Overviews vs Featured Snippets

AI Overviews vs featured snippets contrasts two Google answer formats: a featured snippet extracts a passage verbatim from one ranking page, while an AI Overview synthesizes a generated answer from multiple sources and may cite several at once.

AI Search

AI Search Engine

An AI search engine is a system that answers queries with synthesized, conversational responses drawn from retrieved sources, often citing them inline, rather than returning only a ranked list of blue links.

AI Search

AI Search Monitoring

AI search monitoring is the practice of tracking how and where a brand appears inside AI answer engines — which queries cite it, which mention it by name, and how that presence shifts across engines and over time.

AI Search

AI Search Ranking

AI search ranking is how prominently a brand or page surfaces inside AI-generated answers—whether it is named, how central it is to the answer, and whether its own page is cited—rather than a numbered position on a traditional results page.

AI Search

AI Search Visibility

AI search visibility is the degree to which a brand, page, or product appears and is cited within AI-generated answers across engines like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, rather than only in traditional search rankings.

C

AI Search

ChatGPT Search

ChatGPT Search is OpenAI's feature, launched in late October 2024, that adds live web retrieval and source links to ChatGPT, letting it answer current questions with grounded, conversational responses instead of relying only on trained knowledge.

G

AI Search

Gemini Search

Gemini Search refers to search and answer experiences powered by Gemini, Google's AI model family (rebranded from Bard in February 2024), which generate conversational, synthesized responses drawn from across the web rather than only ranked links.

AI Search

Google AI Mode

Google AI Mode is a conversational AI search experience from Google that lets users ask complex, multi-part questions and receive synthesized answers with follow-ups, going beyond the inline summaries of AI Overviews.

P

AI Search

Perplexity vs ChatGPT

Perplexity vs ChatGPT compares two leading AI answer engines: Perplexity is built around inline source citations for research-style queries, while ChatGPT is a conversational assistant whose Search mode adds web grounding and links.

AI Search

Prompt Tracking

Prompt tracking is the practice of running a defined set of prompts—the questions buyers ask AI engines—on a schedule and recording what the answers say about a brand: whether it is named, how it is described, and whether its pages are cited across engines.

R

AI Search

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a technique that grounds a language model's output in documents retrieved at query time, conditioning the generated answer on real sources to reduce hallucination and keep responses current.