AI search words, in plain English.
What AEO, GEO, schema, crawlers and the rest actually mean.
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What do these AI search words mean?
- AEO (answer engine optimisation)
- Making your content the direct answer to a question, so AI tools and answer boxes can use it.
- GEO (generative engine optimisation)
- Helping AI tools find, trust and accurately describe your business when they write an answer.
- SEO (search engine optimisation)
- Getting your pages to rank in the list of links on a search results page. AEO and GEO build on it.
- AI Overview
- The AI-written summary Google shows above its usual results. Google rolled AI Overviews out across Australia on 29 October 2024.
- AI assistant
- A tool such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Claude that answers questions in conversation, often naming businesses and sometimes linking its sources.
- Citation
- When an AI answer names or links the page it used. Being cited is not guaranteed, and answers change from run to run.
- Crawler
- A program that visits websites to read them. Some collect pages for search, some to answer a question on the spot, and some to train AI models.
- robots.txt
- A small public file that tells crawlers which parts of your site they may visit.
- Sitemap
- A file that lists your pages so crawlers can find them.
- Structured data (schema markup)
- Labels in a page's code that state facts, such as your name, address and services, in a form machines read exactly.
- JSON-LD
- The most common format for structured data. It sits in the page as a block of labelled facts.
- llms.txt
- An optional plain-text file some sites publish to summarise themselves for AI tools. It is not required, and its effect is unproven.
- Entity
- A business, person or place that AI tools try to recognise. The more consistent the facts about you across the web, the safer it is for a tool to state them.
- Canonical link
- A tag that tells machines the preferred address of a page, so copies are not confused with it.
- Zero-click
- When someone gets their answer without clicking through to any website.
FAQ
Questions people ask
What is the difference between AEO and GEO?
AEO is about being the direct answer to a question. GEO is about AI tools finding, trusting and accurately describing your business. They share most of the work, and both build on SEO.
Do I need schema markup?
It helps machines read your facts exactly, and it should match the visible text on the page. It does not guarantee anything.
Is llms.txt required?
No. Google says its AI features do not need it, and its effect is unproven.
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