Concepts

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)

Answer Engine Optimization. A name for optimising to appear in AI answer engines.

AI SEO

A common name for AI-centric SEO: the practice of working toward AI Visibility.

AI Visibility

The broad outcome of AI-centric SEO: being seen, cited, and recommended by AI systems when they answer questions.

AIO (AI Optimization)

AI Optimization. Another name for the practice of improving AI Visibility.

Frequency

How often your citations and mentions occur across AI queries and over time.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)

Generative Engine Optimization. A name for optimising to appear in generative AI engines.

Generative self-retrieval

A reasoning model surfacing facts from its own parameters by generating them as text, where those generated facts then condition and improve its final answer.

Grounding

The process by which an AI system answers with current information: it runs a search, retrieves pages, reads short extracts, and writes its answer from them rather than from memory.

Grounding Bias

A form of secondary bias: how much an AI model defers to, or discounts, retrieved sources once they are grounded into the context, rather than leaning on what it already believed.

Grounding Snippet

A short, extractive selection of sentences pulled from a page and supplied to an AI model as the evidence it grounds an answer on; the atomic unit of visibility in AI search.

Number of Citations

The absolute count of times your pages are cited in AI answers.

Number of Mentions

The absolute count of times your brand is named in AI answers.

Open Knowledge Format

An open, vendor-neutral format for packaging the knowledge AI systems need, as plain markdown files any model or agent can read.

Primary Bias

An AI model's ungrounded confidence in an entity, formed during training and present before any retrieval; in AI search it is the largest single factor in whether a source is selected.

Query Fanout

The step where an AI system splits one prompt into several single-intent sub-queries, each retrieving its own sources; a page can be grounded for one angle of a question and absent for another.

Rank

How prominently your citations and mentions appear within an AI answer.

Relevance Engineering

Engineering a page's semantic relevance to a query with embeddings and vector math, treating visibility as an engineering problem rather than keyword optimization.

Secondary Bias

The post-retrieval layer of selection: how an AI model treats, weights, and is swayed by content once it has been retrieved. Unlike primary bias, it is addressable now.

Selection Rate

The rate at which an AI system chooses a given source from the available grounding candidates when composing an answer; the AI-search equivalent of click-through rate.

Selection Rate Optimization

The AI-search counterpart to CTR optimization: improving how often AI systems select your content as the grounding source for their generated answers.