Reference
GEO Glossary
The 20 terms every business needs to understand to build a website that AI can find, trust, and cite. These are the building blocks of GEO.
Agent-Ready
A website is agent-ready when it is structured so that AI agents -- automated systems that browse the web on behalf of users or other AI systems -- can read, understand, and act on its content without human assistance. Agent-readiness requires schema markup, llms.txt, static content, and clear entity definitions.
AI Citation
When a generative engine includes your business or content in a direct answer it produces for a user. Citations are the GEO equivalent of a page-one ranking. They drive brand exposure, trust, and indirect traffic without requiring a user to click through a search results page.
AI Overviews
Google's feature that generates a direct AI-written answer at the top of search results, above the traditional blue links. AI Overviews pull from pages with strong schema markup, clear structured data, and authoritative content. Being cited in an AI Overview is a primary GEO objective.
Canonical URL
An HTML tag that tells search engines and AI crawlers which version of a page is the authoritative one. Canonical tags prevent duplicate content issues and ensure AI systems index the correct URL for citation.
Citation Monitoring
The practice of tracking how often and where a business is cited in AI-generated answers. It involves querying ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and other generative engines with questions your customers would ask, and recording whether your business appears in the response. Citation monitoring is the primary KPI for GEO performance.
E-E-A-T
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. The framework Google uses to evaluate content quality, and a key signal for AI citation. GEO sites establish E-E-A-T through Person schema for authors, clear organizational credentials, consistent NAP data, and content that demonstrates direct experience.
Entity
In the context of GEO and AI search, an entity is a clearly defined, uniquely identifiable thing -- a person, organization, product, place, or concept. AI systems build knowledge graphs from entities. A website that clearly defines its entities is more likely to be cited accurately.
FAQPage Schema
A schema.org type that marks up question-and-answer content so AI systems can extract and cite individual answers. FAQPage schema is one of the highest-value schema types for GEO because it directly maps to how generative engines answer questions.
Generative Engine
An AI system that generates direct answers to user questions rather than returning a list of links. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Microsoft Copilot are all generative engines. They cite sources rather than rank them.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
The practice of structuring a website so that AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews can read it, understand it, and cite it when answering questions. GEO replaces traditional SEO as the primary driver of web visibility in an AI-first world.
JSON-LD
JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data. The recommended format for embedding schema markup in a webpage. It sits inside a script tag in the page head and is invisible to visitors but fully readable by AI crawlers and search engines.
Knowledge Graph
A structured database of entities and their relationships used by AI systems to answer questions. Google, Bing, and major AI platforms maintain knowledge graphs. A GEO-optimized site contributes to knowledge graph entries by providing clear, consistent, machine-readable entity data.
llms-full.txt
An extended version of llms.txt that includes the full text of key pages, articles, and content. It gives AI systems a comprehensive, machine-readable version of the site without requiring them to crawl and parse every page individually.
llms.txt
A plain-text file placed at the root of a website that gives AI agents a structured index of the site. It describes what the business does, who it serves, what its key pages are, and how to navigate the content. Modeled on robots.txt. Every GEO-ready site needs one.
Open Graph Tags
Meta tags in the page head that control how a page appears when shared on social platforms and referenced by AI systems. They define the title, description, and image for a page. Every GEO page needs complete, accurate Open Graph tags.
robots.txt
A text file at the root of a website that tells crawlers which pages they can and cannot access. For GEO, robots.txt should explicitly allow major AI crawlers including GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, and Googlebot.
Schema Markup
Structured code added to a webpage that tells AI systems and search engines exactly what the content means. Schema uses the vocabulary at schema.org and is written in JSON-LD format. It is the single most important technical layer in GEO. Without it, AI systems have to guess what your page is about.
Semantic HTML
HTML written with tags that describe the meaning of content, not just its appearance. Using h1 for the main heading, article for article content, nav for navigation, and main for primary content helps AI systems understand page structure without relying on visual layout.
Static Crawlable Content
HTML content that is rendered in the page source and readable by bots that do not execute JavaScript. Many modern websites render content dynamically with JavaScript, which AI crawlers and non-JS bots cannot read. GEO requires key content to be present in the raw HTML.
Structured Data
Any data on a webpage that is formatted in a way machines can parse and understand. Schema markup is the most common form of structured data for GEO purposes. Structured data removes ambiguity and allows AI systems to extract facts, relationships, and context directly.
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