Glossary

Optimising to be named and cited inside an AI-generated answer, rather than ranked in a list of links.

The same discipline as AEO under a second name: making a site quotable by systems that generate answers instead of listing links.

Whether AI assistants name your company when answering the questions your buyers ask, and how often they name somebody else.

The share of AI answers to a fixed question set in which your company is named, measured against the companies named instead.

A proposed plain-text file at the root of a domain saying what the site is and which pages a language model should read first.

A bot that fetches web pages for an AI system — to train a model, to build a retrieval index, or live while answering a question.

A link an answer engine attaches to a claim, naming the page the claim came from — as distinct from an unlinked mention.

A system that answers a question in prose instead of returning a ranked list of links — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI search panels.

Machine-readable facts embedded in a page — who published it, what it sells, what it answers — in a vocabulary parsers already know.

Asking answer engines a fixed set of buyer questions on a schedule and recording which companies each answer names.