AEO Glossary

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)

The practice of optimizing a website so AI-powered answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews) can find, read, understand, and cite its content in their generated responses.

AI Visibility

A measure of how often, how prominently, and how positively a brand is mentioned when users ask AI engines relevant questions. SurfRank's visibility score combines mentions, prominence, sentiment, competition, and citations into a single 0–100 number.

AI Overviews

Google's AI-generated summary answers that appear at the top of search results, powered by Gemini. AI Overviews cite sources, and appearing in them drives massive clickthrough.

Brand Mention

Any instance where an AI engine names a brand in its generated response to a user query. The earlier and more prominently the brand appears, the higher the mention quality.

Citation

A source URL that an AI engine links to in its response — typically shown as a superscript number or a list of "sources". Citations drive direct clickthrough to your site.

Crawler / AI Bot

An automated program that fetches web pages. AI-specific crawlers include GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, and Applebot-Extended. Blocking them in robots.txt makes your site invisible to those AIs.

Grounding

When an AI engine retrieves real-time web content to support its answer instead of relying only on its training data. Grounding is what makes citations possible.

llms.txt

An emerging standard file (served at `/llms.txt`) that tells AI systems which pages on your site are important, how to interpret them, and what to prioritize. Think of it as robots.txt for AI.

Prominence

How early and how emphasized a brand appears in an AI's answer. Being mentioned in the first sentence counts more than being mentioned in a footnote.

Prompt Intent

The underlying question or goal behind a user's query to an AI engine. AEO requires optimizing for the full range of intents your audience has — informational, commercial, comparative, navigational.

Render Test

A test that fetches a page the way an AI crawler does and checks whether the actual content is in the returned HTML. Single-page apps (SPAs) often fail this because their content is added by JavaScript after page load.

Schema.org / JSON-LD

A shared vocabulary for marking up website content (Organization, Product, FAQ, Article, etc.) in a format machines can read. JSON-LD is the preferred format — a single <script type="application/ld+json"> tag.

Share of Voice (SoV)

The percentage of AI-generated answers about your category that mention your brand versus competitors. A key leading indicator of AEO health.

Source of Truth

The canonical location of content about your brand, product, or topic. AI engines favor deep, authoritative sources over thin or duplicated content.

Structured Data

Any machine-readable markup (most commonly JSON-LD) that describes your content's meaning — not just its appearance. Dramatically improves AI comprehension and citation likelihood.

Temporal Relevance

How recently content was published or updated, as perceived by an AI engine. Fresh content with clear publish dates is favored for time-sensitive queries.