Glossary
GEO and AEO glossary
The terms used to talk about brand visibility in AI assistants' answers, defined plainly and without embellishment. Each page answers a single question and can be read on its own.
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) Optimizing so an answer engine names your business inside the text it generates. The unit of success is the mention, not the click.
- AI crawlers The bots AI companies use to read the web: which one trains models, which one feeds live answers, and how each one is controlled from robots.txt.
- AI dark traffic Visits that come from AI assistants but show up as direct traffic in your analytics, because the referrer got lost along the way.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) Optimizing so a generative model includes your business in the answer it writes. In practice it's almost the same as AEO, with a different origin.
- Mention and citation A mention is when the assistant names your business in the text. A citation is when it links your page as a source. They happen separately and are measured differently.
- Query fan-out The process by which an AI assistant breaks a single question into several internal searches and builds one answer from what it finds across all of them.