Glossary GEO + AI SEO,
GEO + AI SEO,
A to Z.
Every term that matters in answer-engine optimization, defined plainly. Linked to deeper guides where the concept earns one.
Every entry defines the term plainly, shows how it works, and links to the Truffle metric or feature when one exists. Cross-referenced between related terms.
AI search fundamentals
AI Mode AI Mode is a Google Search experience that replaces the standard results page with a fuller, AI-generated conversation… AI Overview An AI Overview is an AI-generated summary Google shows above the traditional search results, built from several source… Answer Engine An Answer Engine is a search system built to answer a question directly with a generated response, rather than returni… Zero-Click Search A Zero-Click Search is a search that fully satisfies the user's need on the results page itself, through a direct answ…
AI architecture
Grounding Grounding is the practice of anchoring an AI-generated answer to retrieved, verifiable external sources at the moment… Knowledge Cutoff A Knowledge Cutoff is the date after which an AI model's training data stops, so the model has no built-in awareness o… Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) Retrieval Augmented Generation, or RAG, is a technique where an AI model retrieves relevant passages from an external…
Measurement and metrics
AI Visibility AI Visibility is how consistently a brand shows up in AI-generated answers for the specific buyer contexts that matter… Brand Mention A Brand Mention is any instance where an AI-generated answer names your brand, by company name or product name, regard… Citation Rate Citation Rate is the share of AI-generated answers, across a set of tracked prompts, where your website is cited as a… Hallucination Rate Hallucination Rate, in an AI-visibility context, is how often an AI assistant states false or fabricated information a… Prompt Volume Prompt Volume is the number of distinct, real buyer questions or prompts that exist for a given topic or category, use… Sentiment in AI Answers Sentiment in AI Answers is a reading of whether a brand mention inside an AI-generated answer comes across as positive… Share of Voice in AI Share of Voice in AI is the percentage of AI-generated answers, across assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and… Source Attribution Source Attribution is whether an AI-generated answer correctly credits the page it actually drew its information from,… Visibility Score A Visibility Score is a single composite number, usually 0 to 100, that combines several underlying AI-visibility metr…
Strategy and optimization
Practice
Content Chunking Content Chunking is the practice of structuring a page into self-contained sections, each answering one specific quest… E-E-A-T in an AI Context E-E-A-T in an AI Context is the question of whether Google's Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthin… Entity SEO Entity SEO is the practice of structuring content, markup, and mentions so search engines and AI systems recognize a b… Prompt Engineering for Brands Prompt Engineering for Brands is the practice of writing and testing the exact prompts used to check how a brand appea…
Technical access
ClaudeBot ClaudeBot is Anthropic's web crawler, identified by the user-agent token ClaudeBot, used to gather web content that ca… GPTBot GPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler used to gather content for training its AI models. It identifies itself with the user-a… llms.txt llms.txt is a proposed text file, placed at a website's root, that lists and summarizes a site's key pages in a format… OAI-SearchBot OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's crawler dedicated to ChatGPT's search feature, identified by its own user-agent token. It is… Passage Ranking Passage Ranking is when a search or AI system evaluates and ranks individual sections of a page, not just the page as… PerplexityBot PerplexityBot is Perplexity's web crawler, identified by the user-agent token PerplexityBot, that fetches pages to sup… robots.txt for AI Crawlers robots.txt for AI Crawlers means using the standard robots.txt file at a site's root to allow or block specific AI bot… Structured Data for LLMs Structured Data for LLMs is markup, typically JSON-LD following Schema.org vocabulary, added to a page so search engin…
