The Complete Glossary of GEO and AI Visibility Terms Every Marketer Needs to Know

GEO has developed a specific vocabulary. Understanding these terms is essential for navigating AI visibility strategy, communicating with teams and agencies, and interpreting platform data.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

The practice of optimizing a brand's authority, content, and entity data so that AI language models recommend the brand in response to relevant queries. The AI-era equivalent of SEO.

AI Visibility Score

A composite score (0-100) measuring how prominently and accurately a brand appears across major AI platforms. Calculated from mention frequency, position quality, sentiment, cross-platform coverage, and share of voice.

Large Language Model (LLM)

An AI system trained on large datasets to generate human-like text. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, DeepSeek, Meta AI, Grok, and Google AI Overviews are the 9 major LLMs tracked by AHOD.

AI Share of Voice

The percentage of relevant AI category mentions that reference your brand, compared to the total mentions of all brands in your category. If AI mentions 5 brands for 'best project management software' and yours is mentioned twice, your share of voice is 40%.

Entity

A specific, identifiable thing in the world: a person, company, place, or product. AI models build structured knowledge about entities from multiple web sources. Your company is an entity; your brand profile in AI is your entity representation.

Entity Optimization

The practice of ensuring AI has accurate, consistent, and complete entity data for your brand across all web sources: website, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Wikidata, Wikipedia, press coverage, directory listings, and schema markup.

Editorial Authority

The level of trust AI models place in a brand's information based on the quality and volume of third-party editorial coverage. High editorial authority = consistent coverage in DA70+ publications with editorial standards.

Domain Authority (DA)

A score (0-100) developed by Moz measuring the relative authority of a website. DA70+ is the threshold for publications that carry significant AI training data weight.

E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)

Google's content quality framework, also applied by AI systems to evaluate source credibility. Content demonstrating E-E-A-T earns higher AI citation rates.

Google News Indexing

The inclusion of a publication in Google's News index, which feeds AI real-time retrieval systems. Publications with Google News indexing appear in Perplexity, ChatGPT Browse, and Google AI Overviews responses in near-real-time.

Training Data

The dataset used to train an LLM. Content from authoritative sources (authoritative industry sources, Wikipedia, academic publications) is weighted heavily in training data. Your brand's training data presence determines your baseline AI visibility.

Real-Time Retrieval (RAG)

Retrieval-Augmented Generation: AI systems that supplement training data with real-time web search. Perplexity and ChatGPT Browse use RAG to cite current sources.

Mention Rate

The percentage of relevant AI prompts that include a mention of your brand. Tested across 100+ prompts, a 30% mention rate means 30 out of 100 relevant queries resulted in brand mention.

Sentiment Score

AI-assessed sentiment of brand mentions: positive, neutral, or negative. Negative AI sentiment creates a trust deficit for buyers encountering your brand through AI.

First-Position Rate

The percentage of AI mentions where your brand is the first brand mentioned. First-position citations carry 3-4x higher buyer influence than later-position citations.

Prompt Test

A specific query run against an LLM to evaluate brand visibility. GEO programs run 100+ prompt tests across multiple query types: category recommendations, use-case queries, competitor comparisons, and direct brand queries.

Schema Markup

Structured data added to web pages in JSON-LD format to help AI and search engines understand page content. Organization, Product, Article, and FAQPage schemas are most relevant for AI visibility.

Wikidata

A structured knowledge database that feeds AI knowledge graphs. Creating and maintaining an accurate Wikidata entry for your brand improves AI entity accuracy.

SameAs Property

A schema.org property that links your website's Organization entity to authoritative external profiles (LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Wikipedia, Wikidata). This entity linking improves AI knowledge graph accuracy.

Knowledge Graph

AI's structured representation of entity relationships and facts. Google's Knowledge Graph and AI model knowledge graphs both influence what AI 'knows' about your brand.

AI Overviews

Google's AI-generated summary boxes appearing at the top of search results for many queries, replacing traditional featured snippets.

Perplexity

An AI-native search engine that uses real-time web retrieval to generate cited answers. Among the most citation-transparent AI platforms.

Copilot

Microsoft's AI assistant, deeply integrated into Windows, Microsoft 365, and Bing. Dominant in enterprise environments.