The canonical
register.

AEO

The discipline of structuring digital assets so that answer engines can extract, cite and recommend a business or resource when users ask questions. Unlike SEO, which optimizes for ranking position, AEO optimizes for citation in synthesized answers.

GEO

Optimizing a source so that it survives the synthesis step when generative models compose one answer from many inputs. A source can be cited yet lose its wording during synthesis; a source optimized for GEO is quoted verbatim.

LLMO

Preparing content specifically for ingestion, retrieval and citation by large language models, as distinct from classical web search. The broader family under which AEO and GEO are specialised disciplines.

Agentic
SEO

SEO practice oriented toward autonomous agents rather than human browsers — structuring content, endpoints and manifests so autonomous agents can read, compare and take action on behalf of users.

Entity
Optimization

The practice of making a business, concept or institution identifiable as a single entity across the open web via name consistency, sameAs links, Schema.org markup and Knowledge Graph registration.

Citation
Velocity

The rate at which a source accumulates verifiable mentions across answer engines. Measured by the publisher across a canonical query-surface matrix. The metric that replaces ranking position.

llms.txt

A root-level markdown manifest that tells language models which pages to read, in what order and for what purpose. First articulated by Jeremy Howard of Answer.AI as a proposed convention for AI-readable site guidance.

Knowledge
Graph

A structured database of real-world entities (people, organizations, places, concepts) and the relations between them. Search engines and language models reason over knowledge graphs when composing answers.

Generative
Search

Search powered by generative models that returns a synthesized answer instead of a list of links. The mode in which answer engines operate — answers composed from retrieved sources, not ranked results.

RAG
Pipeline

A pattern where a model retrieves relevant documents at query time and then composes an answer grounded in those documents — the mechanism by which modern answer engines cite sources.

Answer
Box

The UI element that displays a synthesized answer above traditional search results. Featured snippets, People Also Ask and AI Overviews are variants. Appearing in the answer box requires structured, extractable content.

Entity
Coherence

The degree to which an entity is represented consistently across all public sources — name, address, Schema.org markup, social profiles and knowledge graphs. A precondition for being cited as one real entity.