AEO Glossary

Every term used across our answer library, defined once, sourced, and linked to the questions that use it.

• AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)

  Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of engineering content, structured data, and entity signals so that generative answer engines retrieve and cite a specific source.

• GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)

  Generative Engine Optimization is a sibling discipline to AEO focused on the phrasing, structure, and evidence patterns that make LLM answer engines quote a source verbatim.

• Answer engine

  An answer engine is a search system that responds to a user query with a synthesized answer, usually generated by a large language model over retrieved web sources, rather than a ranked list of blue links.

• AI Overviews

  AI Overviews is Google's generative answer feature that synthesizes an answer with cited sources on top of standard Google Search results.

• AI crawler

  An AI crawler is an HTTP user agent operated by an AI company to fetch web pages for either model training or serving fresh grounded answers.

• Structured data

  Structured data is machine-readable metadata added to a web page — typically as JSON-LD in the head — that describes the page's content using a shared vocabulary such as schema.org.

• JSON-LD

  JSON-LD (JSON for Linking Data) is a W3C-standardized JSON syntax for encoding linked data, and Google's recommended structured-data format.

• QAPage

  QAPage is a schema.org page type for a page whose primary content is a single user-submitted question with one or more community-submitted answers.

• E-E-A-T

  E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) is Google's Search Quality Rater framework used to grade page and site quality.

• Entity graph

  An entity graph is a machine-readable set of interconnected schema.org nodes (Organization, Person, WebSite, Article) tied together by stable @id references and linked outward via sameAs.

• sameAs

  sameAs is a schema.org property that links an on-site entity node (Organization, Person, CreativeWork) to authoritative off-site profiles such as Wikipedia, Wikidata, and LinkedIn.

• Knowledge graph

  A knowledge graph is a database of real-world entities and their relationships, used by search engines and answer engines to disambiguate names and attach content to the right entity.

• Canonical URL

  A canonical URL is the single URL declared as the master address for a page's content — the one search and answer engines should attribute citations to when the same content is reachable at multiple addresses.

• SSR (Server-Side Rendering)

  Server-Side Rendering is the practice of generating a page's full HTML on the server before it reaches the client, so crawlers (including most AI crawlers) receive the answer text on the first fetch.

• Citation (AI)

  In answer-engine context, a citation is a named reference to a specific source URL that a generative assistant credits when it synthesizes an answer.

• Rich results

  Rich results are Google Search result treatments that include visual or interactive elements beyond the standard title-URL-snippet — enabled by valid structured data on the source page.

• Speakable

  Speakable is a schema.org property (currently in beta at Google) that marks sections of a page best suited to be read aloud by voice assistants.

• Markdown twin

  A markdown twin is a plain-text or markdown copy of an HTML page served at a parallel URL, so retrieval systems can ingest the content without an HTML parser.

• llms.txt

  llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file at a site's root that lists the URLs and short descriptions a site owner wants LLMs to prioritize when summarizing that site.

• IndexNow

  IndexNow is an open protocol jointly announced by Microsoft Bing and Yandex that lets a site push new or changed URLs to participating search engines in near real time.