A plain-English AI visibility glossary
The terms that get thrown around — explained without the jargon.
We test your visibility across the platforms your customers already ask
If you’ve been nodding along to words you’d rather have defined, here they are, in plain English.
AI Search Visibility
How easily AI assistants can find, understand and recommend your business.
GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation
The work of getting your business named inside answers written by generative AI systems, rather than ranked in a list of links. The output you are optimising for is a sentence, not a position.
AEO — Answer Engine Optimisation
The older sibling of GEO. Originally aimed at direct answers and featured snippets, now used more or less interchangeably with GEO. The work overlaps heavily.
AI SEO
The umbrella term for doing conventional search optimisation and AI visibility work together, rather than treating them as separate disciplines.
LLM optimisation (LLMO)
Another label for the same family of work, named after the large language models doing the answering. Less common in the UK than GEO, and means the same thing in practice.
LLM — large language model
The type of system behind ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot. It generates text a word at a time based on patterns, which is why it can sound certain while being wrong.
Entity
How an AI identifies you as a specific, real business rather than a fuzzy guess. Built from your name, location, category, services and the sources that agree about all of them.
Entity clarity
The degree to which the whole public record tells one consistent story about your business. Low clarity is the most common reason an assistant leaves a firm out of an answer.
Structured data (schema)
Machine-readable code that tells AI exactly who you are and what you do. It should always match what a visitor can actually see on the page.
Answer capsule
A short, self-contained passage written so an assistant can lift it cleanly and quote it accurately — usually a direct question as a heading with the direct answer immediately below.
Retrieval (RAG)
When an assistant searches the live web at the moment you ask, reads what it finds, and answers from that. Platforms that retrieve tend to show citations and reflect your changes faster.
Grounding
Tying an answer to a verifiable source rather than to the model’s memory. Well-grounded answers are the ones most likely to name a specific business.
llms.txt
A plain text file at your site root that lists your important pages for AI systems. A sensible courtesy rather than a ranking signal — no major platform has committed to obeying one.
AI crawlers
The user agents AI companies use to read the web — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and others. Blocking them in robots.txt removes you from live-retrieval answers.
AI Overviews
Google’s AI-generated answers that appear above the traditional results.
Hallucination
When an AI states something untrue with confidence — which strong, consistent trust signals help prevent happening about you.
Citation
A reference to your business elsewhere on the web that AI treats as third-party proof.
Corroboration
Several independent, credible sources describing your business the same way. The thing that turns a possible mention into a confident recommendation.
NAP consistency
Name, address and phone number matching exactly everywhere they appear. Old shorthand from local SEO that matters more now, not less.
Share of voice (AI)
How often you are named across a set of test prompts compared with your competitors. Only meaningful if the prompts and dates stay fixed between runs.
Prompt set
The fixed list of customer-style questions used to test visibility. Keeping the wording identical between runs is what makes the comparison honest.
Ready to put the theory to work?
A free audit turns these terms into a plan for your business.
Start With a Free Audit →