AIRank
—— § Glossary

The vocabulary of
AI visibility.

Eight terms carry most of the weight in Generative Engine Optimization, and each one links here to a full definition page: where the term came from, how it is actually measured, and what it changes about the way you write. If you arrived from a scan report and hit a phrase you could not define out loud, this is the page that unpacks it. No marketing gloss, no circular definitions.

—— § How to use this

Read this in two passes. The first is orientation — skim the letters below and stop on anything you could not explain to a colleague without hedging. GEO vocabulary is unusually treacherous because most of it sounds self-explanatory. “Citation density” reads like something you already understand, right up until you try to compute it for a page you wrote last week. Every definition here spells out the measurement method rather than implying it, so the test of understanding is whether you could calculate the thing, not whether the phrase feels familiar.

The second pass is diagnostic. Each entry runs to three full paragraphs plus a closing note on exactly where that concept surfaces inside an AIRank scan, so you can work backwards from a line item in your report to the idea underneath it. Four terms form the spine — Generative Engine Optimization, AI Score, citation density and answer capsule — and the rest hang off those. Every definition page carries a related-terms rail, so once you are inside the glossary the fastest route is to follow the chain sideways rather than bouncing back to this index.

A

2 terms

C

1 term

F

1 term

G

1 term

I

1 term

L

1 term

S

1 term

Missing a term you expected? The documentation covers product-specific concepts, and contact reaches a human who will add it.

—— § Frequently asked

What is Generative Engine Optimization?

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of making a site more likely to be cited inside an AI-generated answer, rather than ranked on a page of blue links. It shares the technical fundamentals of SEO — crawlability, schema, speed — but diverges on content strategy: SEO rewards comprehensive keyword coverage, while GEO rewards short declarative claims, unique data, and paragraph-level chunks a model can lift intact.

How is GEO different from AEO and LLM SEO?

In practice the three names describe the same work. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the term from the 2024 Aggarwal et al. paper and is the one used throughout this glossary. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is the same idea framed around answer engines specifically, and “LLM SEO” is the informal shorthand. Where a distinction is drawn at all, AEO tends to emphasise question-and-answer formatting and GEO the wider retrieval problem.

Which terms should I learn first?

Start with Generative Engine Optimization for the frame, then answer capsule and citation density for the writing model, then AI Score for the measurement. Those four explain most of what a scan report tells you. llms.txt, schema markup, FAQPage schema and indexing APIs are the implementation layer and make far more sense once the first four are in place.

Do these definitions match how AIRank scores a site?

Yes — deliberately. Each entry closes with a note on where the concept appears in the 47-point rubric, so the vocabulary on this page and the line items in your report are the same vocabulary. Citation density, for example, is a weighted check inside the content-extractability pillar rather than a metaphor we use for marketing copy.

How often does the glossary change?

Terms are added when a concept starts showing up in customer conversations often enough that its absence causes confusion, and existing entries are revised when the underlying measurement changes — the AI Score weights, for instance, are re-fit quarterly against a cohort of roughly 3,000 tracked sites, and the entry is updated when they move.

Definitions are the easy half. The how-to guides turn each of these terms into a shipped change.

Go to the how-to guides