Much of the language around generative search is less than three years old, and a good deal of it is deployed to make ordinary work sound proprietary. These are the definitions we actually use with clients. Where a term is genuinely contested we say so rather than pretending otherwise.
The terms, defined
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)
- Structuring content so it can be lifted directly as the answer to a question, rather than merely ranked as a result. In practice it means answering one question per section, in the first sentence, in complete sentences that make sense when quoted out of context.
- AI Overviews
- Google's generated summaries that appear above the traditional results. They are assembled from multiple sources and cite them, so being one of the cited sources matters more than holding a particular ranking position.
- Citation (local)
- A mention of your business name, address and phone number on another website — a directory, a trade register, a local listing. Consistency across citations is a ranking signal; contradictory addresses actively harm you.
- Citation (AI)
- When a language model names your business or links your page as a source in its answer. Unlike a ranking position, it is not a fixed place you occupy — the same question can produce different citations on different days.
- Doorway page
- A page created mainly to capture a search rather than to serve a reader — typically a town name swapped into an otherwise identical template. Google treats these as spam, which is why service-area businesses must be selective rather than exhaustive.
- E-E-A-T
- Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. Google's framework for assessing content quality. It is not a score you can see; it is a description of the signals — named authors with credentials, verifiable claims, genuine first-hand experience.
- Entity
- A thing a search engine or language model recognises as distinct and can hold facts about — a business, a person, a place. Entity resolution is the process of a machine working out that “GEO SEO” and “Expect Best Ltd” refer to the same organisation.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)
- The work of making a business easy for AI answer engines to find, verify and recommend. It overlaps with SEO but optimises for being named in a generated answer rather than for a position in a list of links.
- Google Business Profile
- The listing that powers your presence in Google Maps and the local pack. For many local businesses it is more commercially important than the website, because a large share of customers act on it without ever clicking through.
- Grounding
- When a language model bases its answer on retrieved documents rather than on its training data alone. Grounded answers are the ones that cite sources, which is why having a crawlable, quotable page matters.
- Hallucination
- When a language model states something false with confidence. For a business this most often means invented opening hours, an out-of-date address or a service you do not offer — which is why keeping authoritative sources current is a GEO task, not just a tidiness one.
- Knowledge graph
- A structured store of entities and the relationships between them. Google's version underpins the information panel that appears beside branded searches.
- LLM (Large Language Model)
- The class of model behind ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and similar systems. It generates text by predicting what comes next, which is why it can be fluent and wrong at the same time.
- llms.txt
- A plain-text file at the root of a website that gives AI systems a curated map of the site's most useful pages. It is a proposed convention rather than a standard, and it is cheap to maintain.
- Local pack
- The block of three business listings with a map that appears for local searches. Also called the map pack. Ranking here is driven by proximity, relevance and prominence, and is largely separate from ordinary organic ranking.
- NAP
- Name, Address, Phone. The three details that must match everywhere your business is listed. Inconsistent NAP is one of the most common and most fixable causes of weak local visibility.
- Prompt volume
- How often a given question is asked of AI assistants. It is not the same as search volume and is far harder to measure, which is why a page with no Google demand can still be worth writing.
- RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation)
- A method where a model searches for relevant documents and then writes its answer from them. Most AI answer engines work this way, which means the retrieval step — whether your page is found and judged relevant — decides whether you are cited.
- Schema / structured data
- Machine-readable markup added to a page describing what it contains — a business, an article, a FAQ, a product. It does not change what a human reads, but it removes ambiguity for anything parsing the page.
- SERP
- Search Engine Results Page. Increasingly a misnomer, since a modern results page contains AI summaries, maps, questions and shopping modules alongside the ten links it used to be.
- Service area business
- A business that travels to customers rather than receiving them at premises — a plumber, a mobile vet, a removals firm. Google supports these explicitly, and they should hide their address and set a service area instead.
- The proportion of relevant AI answers in which your brand is mentioned, measured against competitors. The nearest equivalent to a ranking report for generative search, and necessarily a sampled estimate rather than an exact figure.
- Structured data validation
- Checking that your schema markup parses and matches what is on the page. Invalid markup is usually ignored; markup that contradicts the visible page can be treated as deceptive.
- Zero-click search
- A search that ends without anyone clicking a result, because the answer appeared on the results page. It is why visibility and citation are increasingly better measures of performance than sessions alone.
If a supplier uses one of these words in a way that does not match the definition here, that is worth a question rather than an assumption. Vocabulary is the easiest place for a proposal to hide a lack of substance.