Glossary of AEO / GEO Terms

Reference definitions linked to primary academic sources. Each entry includes related-term cross-links and frequently asked questions.

• AI Overviews
  Google's AI-generated answer surface shown above traditional Search results.
• Answer Engine Optimization
  The practice of structuring content so that AI systems cite it as the direct answer to a user query.
• ChatGPT Search
  OpenAI's web-search feature integrated into ChatGPT, which retrieves and cites live web sources.
• Common Crawl
  An open, monthly web crawl that seeds the training corpora of most large language models.
• EU AI Act Article 50(II)
  The transparency provision of the EU AI Act requiring disclosure of AI-generated or AI-assisted content.
• Generative Engine Optimization
  The practice of optimising content to be selected and cited by generative AI engines.
• Knowledge Graph
  A structured representation of entities and the relationships between them, used by search engines and LLMs for grounding.
• llms.txt
  A proposed convention for a site-root markdown file summarising what AI crawlers should read.
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation
  An architecture in which an LLM retrieves documents at inference time and generates an answer grounded in their contents.
• Schema.org
  A standardised vocabulary for structured data on the web, used to mark up entities and relationships.