GEO & AIO Glossary

All the AI Visibility Jargon, Explained Without Needing a PhD

A fast-moving sector inevitably invents three new acronyms a week. GEO is no exception: between technical terms inherited from machine learning and not-always-necessary marketing neologisms, it's easy to get lost. Here's a list of terms you'll encounter most often when reading about the topic — defined without unnecessary jargon, and with a minimum of humor to keep it digestible.

GEO — Generative Engine Optimization

All the practices aimed at improving a brand's visibility and recommendation in AI-generated responses (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini...). The equivalent of SEO, but for engines that answer instead of listing links.

AIO — AI Optimization

A term sometimes used as a synonym for GEO, sometimes to denote something broader (optimizing your presence in the ENTIRE AI ecosystem, not just answer engines). In practice, most people mean the same thing when they say GEO or AIO. Don't lose sleep over the nuance.

LLM — Large Language Model

The artificial intelligence model behind ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and company. Technically, a massive neural network trained on astronomical amounts of text. For our purposes: the thing that decides whether your brand deserves to be cited or not.

Prompt

The question or instruction you type into an AI. In GEO, you never work on a single isolated prompt: you test dozens of realistic phrasings, because the answer can flip 180 degrees depending on exactly how you ask.

RAG — Retrieval-Augmented Generation

The technique that allows an AI to fetch up-to-date information from the web before answering, rather than relying solely on what it learned during training (which can be months old). It's this mechanism that makes your AI visibility fluid: what the AI finds today may be different from what it found yesterday.

Grounding

The act, for an AI, of anchoring its response in real, verifiable sources rather than 'reciting' from memory. The better a brand is anchored in credible external sources, the more likely it is to be cited — and the less likely the AI is to make stuff up about it.

Embeddings

The way an AI transforms text into a mathematical representation that captures meaning, not just exact words. This is what allows a model to understand that 'eco-friendly shoes' and 'sustainable sneakers' are essentially the same thing, even without a single common word.

Hallucination

When an AI invents information with total confidence, without any real source to back it up. Funny when it's about an imaginary recipe. Much less so when it's about your price or return policy. One more reason to maintain a clear, consistent web presence: it reduces the risk of the AI improvising on your behalf.

AI Citation

The act, for an AI, of explicitly mentioning your brand (with or without a link) in its response. The basic unit of measurement in GEO — a bit like the click in traditional SEO, except here being cited can be enough to convince without clicking anywhere.

Synthetic Share of Voice

The proportion of times your brand is cited by an AI, compared to your competitors, on a set of questions representative of your industry. The metric that is gradually replacing the sacrosanct 'Google ranking' as the thermometer of visibility.

Brand Mentions

Any mention of your brand, anywhere on the web — not just on your own site. That's what AIs scrutinize to assess your legitimacy: a brand mentioned only by itself has, in the eyes of an LLM, about the credibility of a self-published press release.

Search Intent

What the user is REALLY looking for behind their query — informational ('what is'), commercial ('what's the best'), transactional ('buy'), or navigational ('official site of'). AIs are particularly good at guessing the real intent, even if poorly phrased — which means your content must answer the intent, not just the literal keyword.

Long Tail

Long and specific queries ('best waterproof hiking shoe for wide feet') as opposed to short and generic ones ('shoes'). In GEO, the long tail is often the most accessible territory for a brand that doesn't yet have the authority to be cited on the broadest, most competitive questions.

Zero-click search

A search that ends without any link being clicked, because the answer was already in the results (or in the AI response). Google has been doing this for years with featured snippets; generative engines push the concept to its peak.

AI Overviews (ex-SGE)

The AI-generated summary that Google displays at the top of some search results, even before the traditional list of links. Formerly known by the code name SGE (Search Generative Experience) during its testing phase. If your brand appears there, you capture attention before the user even scrolls.

Featured Snippet

The box that displays an answer extracted directly from a webpage, right at the top of Google results, even before the first classic link. The direct ancestor of AI Overviews — Google was already doing zero-click long before it was trendy.

Answer Engine

An engine designed from the start to answer directly rather than list links — Perplexity is the purest example. As opposed to a traditional search engine, historically designed to index and rank pages.

SERP

Search Engine Results Page — the good old Google results page, with the ten blue links (and now, increasingly, an AI summary on top). The historic turf of SEO, still relevant, just shared with new occupants.

Knowledge Graph

Google's structured knowledge base that connects entities together (a brand, its products, its industry, its competitors). The better your brand is represented there, the more likely AI systems relying on it will understand you without ambiguity.

E-E-A-T

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness — the criteria that Google (and by extension, a good part of the AI ecosystem that relies on similar signals) uses to judge whether content is reliable. Still relevant in GEO: an AI prefers to cite a source that seems to know what it's talking about.

Schema.org (Structured Data)

A standardized vocabulary that allows describing page content in a format that machines understand directly (product name, price, reviews, organization...), rather than making them guess by reading free text. One of the most profitable GEO levers: little effort, big impact.

Backlink

A link pointing to your site from another site. Still a classic authority signal in SEO — and still useful in GEO, since a link from a credible third-party source is also a way for an AI to discover you and cross-reference you with other sources.

Domain Authority

An estimate of a site's overall credibility, usually calculated from the volume and quality of links pointing to it. A useful signal but it doesn't tell the whole story: a low-authority site that is highly relevant to a specific question can easily be cited instead of an off-topic behemoth.

Crawlability

The ability of a site to be easily crawled and understood by a bot (search engine or AI). A site riddled with technical blockages, content hidden behind user interaction, or heavy JavaScript can be invisible to a system that doesn't have the time or resources to decipher everything.

A Living Glossary

This lexicon will likely grow in the coming months — the industry invents new terms about as fast as it invents new AI models. If a word is missing or made you raise an eyebrow when you saw it elsewhere, it will probably end up here sooner or later.