GEO Handbook
GEO Glossary
The terms of Generative Engine Optimization, briefly explained and put into context.
- Mention
- A mention is when your brand is named in an AI answer, with or without a link.
- Citation
- A citation is a source that an AI answer links to or explicitly names as evidence.
- Sentiment
- Sentiment describes how an AI talks about your brand: positive, neutral or negative.
- Share of Voice
- Share of voice is your share of all brand mentions on a topic, compared with your competitors.
- Prompt
- A prompt is the question or instruction someone gives an AI assistant. In GEO it plays the role the keyword plays in SEO.
- Query Fan-Out
- With query fan-out, the AI splits a question into several sub-searches, finds sources for each and merges the results into one answer.
- RAG
- RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) means the language model fetches relevant content from a search or database before answering and builds its answer on it.
- Grounding
- Grounding means an AI bases its answer on retrieved sources instead of only on its trained knowledge.
- Entity
- An entity is a clearly identifiable thing, such as a brand, a person, a place or a product, that search engines and AI models know as a distinct concept with properties and relationships.
- LLM
- An LLM (large language model) is a model trained on huge amounts of text that generates text by predicting the most likely next word, word by word.
- AI Overview
- An AI Overview is the AI-generated summary Google shows above the classic search results, with links to the sources it relies on.
- AI Mode
- AI Mode is a separate Google search mode where you ask in chat format and get a detailed AI answer with sources instead of a list of links.
- Hallucination
- A hallucination is an AI statement that sounds convincing but is false or made up, such as a wrong price, an invented source or a service the brand doesn’t offer at all.
- llms.txt
- The llms.txt is a proposed text file in a website’s root directory that gives AI systems a compact Markdown overview of the most important content.
- Training data
- Training data is the text a language model learned its knowledge from.
- AI crawlers
- AI crawlers are bots from AI providers that fetch websites, either to collect training data or to retrieve content to answer a specific question.