Glossary

AI search, explained term by term.

The language of SEO, AEO, GEO and AI search — defined in plain English for South African businesses. Bookmark it, or jump straight to a term.

A

AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation): Optimising content so search and AI answer engines can extract a direct answer from it — winning featured snippets, voice answers and AI citations rather than just ranked links.
AI Mode: Google’s fully conversational search experience, where an AI assistant answers questions and follow-ups in a chat-style interface. The large majority of AI Mode sessions end without a click to any website.
AI Overview: The AI-generated answer Google displays above traditional search results, assembled from sources it considers reliable. AI Overviews are live in South African results and appear on a growing share of searches.
AI Search: Finding information by asking an AI assistant — or an AI-powered search feature — a natural-language question and receiving a synthesised answer, instead of browsing a list of links.
AI Search Optimisation: The practice of making a business visible across AI search tools — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews — by combining SEO, AEO and GEO.

Backlink: A link from another website to yours. Quality backlinks signal authority to search engines and help your pages rank and be retrieved by AI engines.

Citation (AI citation): A mention of or reference to your business or content inside an AI-generated answer. AI citations are the AI-search equivalent of ranking — and the goal of GEO.
ChatGPT: OpenAI’s conversational AI assistant, one of the most-used AI tools worldwide, with a web-search capability that retrieves and cites live sources.
Conversational search: Searching by asking questions in natural language and refining through follow-ups — as with ChatGPT or Google’s AI Mode — rather than typing keywords.
Core Web Vitals: Google’s metrics for page experience: loading speed, interactivity and visual stability. Good scores help rankings and the fast crawlability AI engines rely on.
Crawler (bot): Automated software that reads web pages. AI crawlers include GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot and Google-Extended.

E-E-A-T: Google’s framework for content quality — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. Strong E-E-A-T signals help both ranking and AI citation.
Entity: A distinct thing an engine can recognise and connect — a business, person, place or concept. Clear entity signals help AI engines understand and recommend your business.

Featured snippet: A short answer Google displays at the top of results ("position zero"), extracted from a ranking page. A primary target of answer engine optimisation.

Gemini: Google’s family of AI models, powering its Gemini assistant and the AI features built into Google Search.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation): Optimising to earn citations and recommendations inside AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.
Generative AI: AI that creates new content — text, images, answers — from patterns in its training data. The technology behind ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews.
Google Business Profile: The free Google listing that controls how a business appears in Google Maps and local search. Central to local SEO and "near me" visibility.
Grounding: Connecting an AI model’s answer to verifiable external sources, usually via live web retrieval, so the response reflects real, current information.

Hallucination: When an AI model states something false or fabricated as fact. Clear, well-structured, well-cited content reduces the chance of your business being misrepresented.

IndexNow: A protocol that instantly notifies search engines — Bing and partners, which feed some AI tools — when your pages change, instead of waiting for a crawl.

JSON-LD: The recommended format for structured data: a small script that describes a page’s meaning to machines without affecting how it looks to people.

Knowledge Graph: Google’s database of entities and their relationships, used to power knowledge panels and inform answers. Being a recognised entity improves visibility.

LLM (Large Language Model): The AI, trained on vast amounts of text, that powers assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude by predicting and generating language.
llms.txt: A plain-text file that summarises a website and links its key pages to help AI systems understand it — a newer, GEO-oriented complement to robots.txt and sitemaps.
Local pack (map pack): The block of local business listings with a map that Google shows for location-based searches. Won through local SEO and a strong Google Business Profile.
Long-tail keyword: A longer, more specific search phrase with lower competition — often phrased as a question, and exactly the kind of query AI search rewards.

Mention rate: The share of relevant questions for which an AI engine names your business. The core metric GEO tracks, the way SEO tracks rankings.

Perplexity: An AI-powered answer engine that responds to questions with synthesised answers and prominent source citations.
Prompt: The question or instruction a person gives an AI assistant. The phrasing of a prompt shapes which businesses an AI names in its answer.

Quick Answer: A concise, direct answer — often 40–60 words — placed prominently on a page so engines can extract and quote it whole.

RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation): A technique where an AI retrieves relevant documents from the web or a database before generating its answer, so responses reflect current, citable sources.
robots.txt: A file telling crawlers which parts of a site they may access. Misconfigured rules can accidentally block AI crawlers such as GPTBot.

Schema markup: Standardised structured-data vocabulary (schema.org) that labels your content’s meaning — business, service, FAQ, article — for search and AI engines.
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation): Optimising a website to rank in search engine results through technical health, relevant content and authority. The foundation layer AI search builds on.
SERP: Search Engine Results Page — the page of results, including AI Overviews, snippets and local packs, returned for a query.
Sitemap: An XML file listing a site’s pages to help search engines discover and crawl them efficiently.
Structured data: Machine-readable information, usually JSON-LD using schema.org, that tells engines what your content means — enabling rich results and clearer AI understanding.

Voice search: Searching by speaking to a device or assistant. Voice answers draw on the same answer-ready, conversational content that answer engine optimisation produces.

Zero-click search: A search answered on the results page itself — by an AI Overview, featured snippet or knowledge panel — without the user clicking through to any website.

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