| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| AEO | Answer Engine Optimisation — making your business the answer an AI gives. |
| GEO | Generative Engine Optimisation — the same job, named after the 2024 academic paper. |
| AI Overviews | Google's AI summary box at the top of search results. |
| AI Mode | Google's conversational search tab. Heavier fan-out, passage-level retrieval. |
| RAG | Retrieval-Augmented Generation — the model retrieves real documents before answering, rather than answering from memory. |
| Query fan-out | One user question expanded into many narrower sub-queries, run in parallel. |
| Passage / chunk | The fragment of a page that is actually retrieved and scored — not the whole page. |
| Citation | The source link an AI attaches to a claim in its answer. |
| Share of voice | Your brand's mentions as a proportion of all brand mentions across a fixed prompt set. |
| Presence rate | The share of your tracked prompts where you appear at all. |
| Prompt set | A fixed list of questions you re-run on a schedule to measure visibility. |
| Entity | A resolved, machine-readable identity for a real-world thing — your company, your people, your locations. |
| Knowledge Graph | Google's database of entities and the relationships between them. |
| Wikidata | Open structured database that feeds the Knowledge Graph. Easier to enter than Wikipedia. |
| Schema / JSON-LD | Machine-readable markup describing what a page is about. Useful for identity and rich results; not an AI unlock. |
sameAs | The schema property listing your other official profiles, declaring they are all the same entity. |
| NAP | Name, Address, Phone — the trio that must be identical everywhere. |
| SSR / pre-rendering | Generating page content on the server so it exists in the HTML before any JavaScript runs. |
| SPA | Single-Page Application — a site rendered in the browser. The highest-risk architecture for AI visibility. |
robots.txt | The file telling crawlers what they may fetch. Where most AI visibility is accidentally destroyed. |
| IndexNow | Open protocol pushing changed URLs to Bing instantly. Free, and matters because ChatGPT retrieves via Bing. |
| GPTBot / OAI-SearchBot | OpenAI's training crawler and search crawler respectively. Blocking the second removes you from ChatGPT answers; blocking the first does not. |
| Google-Extended | The user-agent controlling whether your content trains Gemini. Blocking it does not affect Search or AI Overviews. |
| Zero-click | A search that ends without the user visiting any website. |
| Hallucination | A confident, plausible, false statement — often about your business. |
| UCP / ACP / AP2 | Competing agentic-commerce standards for discovery, checkout and payment authorisation. |
Appendix A
Glossary
Every term used in this book, in one line each.
Chapter 24 of 26 · 2 min read
Read the whole book
Answering Machines is 26 chapters on being the answer when your customer stops searching and starts asking. Free, ungated, and every figure is sourced and confidence-rated.