Reference
AI search glossary
21 terms you’ll meet when getting a business found by Google and cited by AI — defined in one or two sentences each.
- AEO (answer engine optimisation)
- Structuring content so search engines, voice assistants and AI tools can extract a direct answer — question headings, answer-first paragraphs, lists, tables and FAQ markup.
- AI Overviews
- Google’s AI-generated summaries shown above search results, built from pages Googlebot has indexed and linked as sources.
- Answer-first paragraph
- A 40–80 word paragraph placed immediately under a question heading that answers it directly, so it can be quoted on its own.
- areaServed
- A Schema.org property listing the places a business serves. It helps local and AI answers match you to location-based questions.
- Canonical URL
- The preferred address of a page, declared with <link rel="canonical">, so duplicate URL variants don’t compete.
- Citability
- How likely a passage is to be quoted by an AI assistant: self-contained, the right length, names the business and states concrete facts.
- Citation
- A link or numbered reference to a source inside an AI-generated answer. Being cited is the AI-era equivalent of ranking.
- Entity
- A uniquely identifiable thing — a business, person, place or product — that search engines and AI models build knowledge about.
- Entity consistency
- Using the exact same business name, address, phone and profiles everywhere, so machines are confident all signals describe one entity.
- FAQPage schema
- Structured data that marks up visible questions and answers so machines can read them as Q&A pairs.
- GEO (generative engine optimisation)
- Making a website easy for generative AI systems to read, trust and cite, so the business is named inside AI answers.
- JSON-LD
- The structured-data format Google recommends: a JSON block in the page that describes it using Schema.org vocabulary.
- llms.txt
- A proposed Markdown file at /llms.txt that gives AI systems a curated summary of a site and links to its key pages.
- LocalBusiness schema
- Schema.org markup describing a business with a physical location or service area: name, address, phone, hours, areas served and profiles.
- NAP
- Name, address and phone — the three identity details that must match across your site, schema and listings.
- Passage retrieval
- The step where an AI system selects short passages from many pages before writing an answer. Pages win citations passage by passage.
- robots.txt
- A file at /robots.txt telling crawlers which paths they may fetch. It decides whether AI search bots can read your site at all.
- sameAs
- A Schema.org property linking your official profiles (LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, social accounts) to confirm your identity.
- Server-side rendering
- Delivering page content in the initial HTML instead of building it with JavaScript in the browser. Most AI crawlers don’t run JavaScript.
- Surge Score
- AIRankSurge’s deterministic 0–100 measure of search and AI readiness, built from 66 weighted checks across five pillars.
- Training crawler
- A bot that collects content to train AI models, such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot or CCBot. Blocking it does not remove you from AI search answers.
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