Glossary
Definitions
5 definitions
AEO (answer engine optimization)
AEO is an older name for the same goal as GEO: being the source an answer engine picks when it answers a question directly, from featured snippets to AI assistants.
AI Mode
AI Mode is Google's conversational search tab: the whole answer is generated, follow-up questions keep the thread, and a few sources are linked next to the text.
AI Overviews
AI Overviews are the AI-written summaries Google shows at the top of some search results, with links to the pages the summary was built from.
AI citation
An AI citation is a link an assistant places next to its answer to show where a statement comes from. It is the unit GEO work is measured in.
AI crawlers (GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot)
AI crawlers are the robots the assistant companies use to read websites, either to train models or to fetch sources for answers. Each has a name a site can allow or block in robots.txt.