AI search terms, defined.
The category hasn't settled on one vocabulary yet. Here's a plain-English reference for the terms that come up in evaluation and team discussions.
- AEO
- Answer Engine Optimization.
- Practice of making your content show up as the cited source when an AI answer engine (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini) answers a buyer's question. Distinct from SEO because the optimization target is the assistant's response, not a search results page.
- Also seeGEOHow it works
- AI visibility
- Whether AI assistants surface your brand when buyers ask category-relevant questions.
- The umbrella metric for AEO/GEO/LLMO programs. Usually tracked as citation rate plus mention quality across a defined prompt set and competitor set.
- Also seeTracking AI visibility
- Buyer journey matrix
- Grid of buyer stages × competitors that maps where AI assistants cite you vs others.
- Monroya's home view. Rows are Discovery / Evaluation / Decision; columns are you and your competitor set. Each cell carries a score (0–100) and a list of the prompts driving it. Every cell with a gap is an actionable opportunity.
- Also seeBuyer Journey Intelligence
- Citation
- An AI assistant linking to a specific URL as the source for a claim in its answer.
- Citations are extracted from the provider's native citation payload (Perplexity citations, Gemini grounding, ChatGPT browsing) plus a fallback URL parse. Citations are the strongest mention class — they drive click-through and rank-of-trust.
- Citation rate
- Share of runs in which your domain appears in an assistant's source ledger for a given prompt.
- Measured 0–100% per prompt per provider. Each prompt runs three times per scan; citation rate is the share of those runs that cite your domain. The headline AI visibility metric.
- Also seeMethodology
- GEO
- Generative Engine Optimization.
- Often used interchangeably with AEO. Same idea: optimize for generative answers, not blue links. The 'engine' framing emphasizes that ChatGPT and Perplexity now function as search engines for a meaningful slice of B2B buyer journeys.
- Also seeAEOLLMO
- Grounding
- The provider-side process of attaching real web sources to a generated answer.
- Google's term for the citation pipeline in Gemini. The structured groundingMetadata payload is the most reliable source extraction signal Gemini exposes.
- LLMO
- Large Language Model Optimization.
- Yet another label for the same category as AEO and GEO. The category hasn't settled on one name. Pick whichever your team uses and move on — the work is the same.
- Also seeAEOGEO
- Mention class
- How an assistant references your brand: cited, named, category, or absent.
- Classifier output per prompt per provider. Cited = linked source. Named = mentioned by name without a link. Category = your category mentioned, you aren't. Absent = no mention at any level. Used alongside citation rate to score visibility.
- Opportunity
- A specific, ranked action that closes a measured visibility gap.
- Generated per buyer-journey matrix cell where your score trails the competitor set. Carries an estimated lift, an effort estimate, and a draft asset ready to ship.
- Prompt
- A query you want to track AI assistant behavior on.
- Mix of discovery, evaluation, and decision-stage questions your buyers ask. Generated during onboarding, edited by you, then run three times per provider per scan.
- Scan
- One full pass of every tracked prompt × every provider.
- Either weekly (automated, no quota impact) or manual (counts against your monthly limit, used to measure the lift from a specific change).
- Source ledger
- Per-prompt list of every URL the providers cited, normalized and deduped.
- The raw evidence behind every visibility score. Use it to find which competitor pages, Reddit threads, or third-party sources are doing the work.