AEO & AI Citations Glossary

AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization, is the practice of structuring content so AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews can extract and cite a direct answer to a user's question.

AI Overviews are Google's generative summaries that appear above the traditional search results, synthesising multiple sources into a direct answer with inline citations.

Author schema is Person structured data attached to an article that identifies the author, links to their profile, and asserts the credentials behind the byline.

A canonical URL is the preferred version of a page, declared via a link rel=canonical tag, used to consolidate signals across duplicate or near-duplicate URLs.

A content cluster is a group of related articles — one pillar page plus multiple spoke articles — that internally link to reinforce a topical entity.

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness — Google's framework for evaluating content quality, and now a proxy for AI citation eligibility.

In SEO and AEO, an entity is a distinct thing — a person, organisation, place, product, or concept — that search and answer engines recognise and link to a knowledge graph.

A featured snippet is a highlighted answer that appears at the top of a Google search result, extracted directly from a ranking page.

GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization, is the broader discipline of optimising for AI-generated results — including AI answers, generative summaries, and multi-source syntheses like Google AI Overviews.

GPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler that fetches pages to improve future versions of ChatGPT and other OpenAI models.

Internal linking is the practice of linking between pages on the same domain to distribute authority, guide crawlers, and reinforce topical relationships.

JSON-LD (JSON for Linked Data) is the recommended format for embedding schema.org structured data on a web page, delivered inside a script tag in the document head.

A knowledge graph is a database of entities and the relationships between them, used by search and answer engines to understand context and disambiguate references.

LLM SEO is the practice of optimising content, structure, and site signals so large language models — trained or retrieval-augmented — surface, quote, and attribute your site as a source.

llms.txt is a proposed standard file placed at the root of a website that gives LLMs a curated, markdown-formatted map of the site's most important content.

PerplexityBot is the crawler used by Perplexity AI to index pages for its real-time answer engine.

A pillar page is the canonical, comprehensive resource for a topic on a site, serving as the hub that all related spoke articles link back to.

robots.txt is a text file at the root of a website that tells crawlers which paths they may or may not fetch.

Schema markup is structured data added to a page — typically as JSON-LD — that describes the content in a machine-readable vocabulary defined by schema.org.

Speakable is a schema.org type that identifies sections of a page suitable for text-to-speech playback, used by voice assistants and increasingly by AI answer engines.