The vocabulary, without the vagueness.
Half the confusion around AI search is people using the same word for different things. Here is what we mean by each one.
- 01CorpusIs anything written about you, in the market’s language
- 02Entity resolutionDoes all of it count as the same brand
- 03CitabilityDoes a passage survive being lifted out
- 04Structured dataAre the facts stated in a form a machine reads
measured asNamed rateHow many of a fixed panel of questions produce an answer containing your brand
| Term | What it means | Updated |
|---|---|---|
| Answer engine optimization (AEO) | Answer engine optimization is the practice of getting a brand named and accurately described inside the synthesised answers produced by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, rather than ranked in a list of links. | |
| Citability | Citability is how readily a passage of text can be lifted out of a page and used verbatim in an AI answer. | |
| Corpus | A corpus is the body of text an AI system draws on when it answers a question about a category — your own site, marketplace listings, retailer pages, review publications, forum threads and video transcripts. | |
| Entity resolution | Entity resolution is the process by which a search or AI system decides that several mentions — a brand name, a legal name, a romanised spelling, a social handle — all refer to the same organisation. | |
| Generative engine optimization (GEO) | Generative engine optimization is a term used interchangeably with answer engine optimization for the practice of improving how a brand appears in AI-generated answers. | |
| llms.txt | llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file at a website's root that lists its most important pages with short descriptions, intended to help AI systems understand the site. | |
| Named rate | Named rate is the share of a fixed panel of buyer questions that produce an AI answer containing your brand name. | |
| Prompt panel | A prompt panel is a fixed set of buyer questions run across multiple AI engines on a regular schedule to measure brand visibility in AI answers over time. | |
| Structured data | Structured data is machine-readable markup — Schema.org vocabulary in JSON-LD — that states explicitly what a page is about, who published it, and how its entities relate. |
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