GEO glossary

Plain-language definitions for generative engine optimization, citation share, and AI answer measurement.

AEO vs GEO

AEO and GEO are overlapping disciplines: AEO emphasises being cited inside answer-engine responses, while GEO covers the broader generative-search surface including AI Overviews and chat assistants.
AI Overview

AI Overview is the AI-generated summary that appears at the top of a Google search results page, replacing or preceding the traditional ranked links.
Answer engine

An answer engine is an AI system that synthesises a direct answer to a user query, typically grounded by retrieved sources, instead of returning a ranked list of links.
Citation

A citation is an explicit, linked reference inside an AI-generated answer pointing to a specific source URL, distinct from an unlinked brand mention.
Citation share

Citation share is the percentage of source links inside AI-generated answers that point to a given domain, measured against all citations across direct competitors.
Content brief

A content brief is a structured plan for a single piece of content, title, headings, key questions, source material, designed to give a writer (human or AI) the inputs needed to produce an answer-shaped page.
GEO

GEO, generative engine optimization, is the discipline of structuring content and signals so generative AI engines cite a brand inside their synthesized answers.
Prompt

A prompt is the natural-language input a user types or speaks into an AI engine, the question or instruction that triggers a generated answer.
Retrieval-augmented generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a technique where AI models fetch external grounding information at query time, usually via web search or vector retrieval, rather than relying solely on training-data memory.
Schema markup

Schema markup is structured-data annotation, usually JSON-LD, that labels page content with explicit types like Article, FAQ, or Product so AI engines can parse it accurately.
Source attribution

Source attribution traces a mention or citation in an AI-generated answer back to the specific page, paragraph, or passage that the model used as the source.
Structured data

Structured data is page content annotated in a machine-readable format, JSON-LD, microdata, or RDFa, so AI engines and search crawlers can interpret meaning beyond the raw text.