AI SEO Glossary
Plain-English definitions for the terms that matter in AI search visibility.
AI Overviews
Google's AI-generated summary shown above normal search results for many queries, synthesized from a handful of source pages. If your page isn't cited here, you lose that traffic even if you rank #1 below it.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
The practice of optimizing content so generative AI systems (ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews, Perplexity) are more likely to cite or recommend it - the AI-era equivalent of SEO, with different signals (crawler access, structured data, clear entity information) mattering more.
llms.txt
An emerging standard (llmstxt.org) - a plain-text file at your site's root that tells AI agents what your site is about and which pages matter most, similar in spirit to a sitemap but written for language models to read.
AI Crawler
A bot operated by an AI company to fetch web content for training or real-time answers - e.g. GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI), Google-Extended (Google), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot (Perplexity). If your robots.txt blocks these, that AI can never cite you, regardless of content quality.
CSR vs SSR
Client-Side Rendering means your page's real content is injected by JavaScript after the initial page load - which most AI crawlers never execute, so they see a blank page. Server-Side Rendering (or static generation) sends the full content in the first HTML response, which every crawler can read.
Structured Data / Schema (JSON-LD)
Machine-readable markup (schema.org vocabulary, usually as JSON-LD) that explicitly labels what a piece of content is - an Article, FAQ, HowTo, Product, Organization. It removes ambiguity for both search engines and AI models about what your page means.
Core Web Vitals
Google's three key page-experience metrics: LCP (how fast the main content loads), CLS (how much the layout shifts while loading), and INP/TBT (how responsive the page is to interaction). They're a confirmed ranking factor and directly affect conversion.
Thin Content
Pages with too little substantive text to be useful or authoritative on their topic - typically under a few hundred words with no real depth. Both search engines and AI models tend to skip these in favor of more comprehensive sources.
Canonical Tag
An HTML tag (<link rel="canonical">) that tells search engines which URL is the "master" version when the same or similar content is reachable at multiple URLs, preventing duplicate-content dilution.
AI Citation
When an AI model (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity) names or links to your site as the source of an answer. This is the AI-search equivalent of a top search ranking, and it's what AIMXOS's AI Visibility Lab directly measures by asking real questions and checking the real answers.
Entity Clarity
How unambiguously a page identifies who or what it's about - its brand, author, organization, and how those connect to other known entities. AI models rely heavily on this to decide whether a source is trustworthy enough to cite.