Glossary
AEO / GEO / AI-readiness, explained.
The 2026 vocabulary for being found by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity — without the marketing spin. Each term is a self-contained explainer with cited sources.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring website content so AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity cite it directly when answering user questions.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of structuring website content so generative AI engines like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini cite it when generating answers.
llms.txt
llms.txt is a proposed open standard published at a website's root that lists URLs and summaries to help AI assistants find a site's most important content.
Schema.org structured data
Schema.org is an open vocabulary for marking up website content as machine-readable structured data — used by Google, AI assistants, and other engines to understand what a page is about.
OAI-SearchBot
OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's user-agent for indexing pages that ChatGPT cites in its search-grounded answers — distinct from GPTBot, which is for training.
JSON-LD
JSON-LD (JSON for Linking Data) is the recommended format for embedding Schema.org structured data in HTML — a JSON block inside a <script type="application/ld+json"> tag.
LocalBusiness Schema
LocalBusiness is the Schema.org type for brick-and-mortar businesses — restaurants, salons, clinics, hotels, and other physical-location services.
sameAs cross-references
sameAs is a Schema.org property that points from a business or person entity to their canonical references on Wikipedia, Wikidata, LinkedIn, and other authoritative sources.
robots.txt for AI bots
robots.txt is the file at the root of a website that tells crawlers what they can and cannot fetch — including, since 2023-2024, a growing set of AI-specific user agents like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot.
GPTBot
GPTBot is OpenAI's training-data crawler — distinct from OAI-SearchBot (which powers ChatGPT search citations) and ChatGPT-User (which represents user-triggered fetches).
KDD 2024 GEO paper
Aggarwal et al. (2024), "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization" — the foundational research on how to structure content so AI assistants cite it.
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