AI SEO Course Glossary: the Terms AI SEO Training Uses

AI SEO course glossary: 23 terms

This AI SEO course glossary defines the vocabulary that AI SEO, GEO and AEO courses use, with the date a term or system first appeared where there is one.

AI SEO

Search engine optimization aimed at answers generated by AI systems as well as, or instead of, ranked lists of links. Course titles also use it for doing conventional SEO with AI tools, so check which sense a course means.

Generative engine

A search or answer system that writes a response with a large language model from sources it retrieves, rather than returning only a list of links. The term comes from the paper that formalized GEO.

Generative engine optimization (GEO)

Improving the visibility of content in the responses of generative engines. The term was formalized in a paper first posted to arXiv on November 16, 2023, whose authors reported visibility gains of up to 40% with effects that varied by domain.

Answer engine optimization (AEO)

Optimizing content so that systems which answer questions directly, including AI assistants and search features, extract and cite it. HubSpot uses the term for the certifications that replaced its SEO certification in June 2026.

LLM optimization (LLMO)

Optimizing for how large language models describe, recommend or cite a brand or page. Often used interchangeably with GEO.

AI Overviews

Google's generated summaries shown above search results, rolled out to everyone in the United States from May 14, 2024 after testing as the Search Generative Experience.

Search Generative Experience (SGE)

Google's experiment with generative AI in Search, announced on May 10, 2023 and offered through Search Labs; the predecessor of AI Overviews.

AI Mode

A conversational search mode Google introduced as a Search Labs experiment on March 5, 2025, drawing on the web and on sources such as the Knowledge Graph and shopping data.

ChatGPT search

OpenAI's search feature, introduced on October 31, 2024, which answers questions with links to web sources.

Query fan-out

Issuing several related searches across subtopics and data sources to build one answer. Google describes AI Mode and AI Overviews as using it, which is why AI SEO courses teach coverage of related questions rather than one keyword.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)

An architecture that combines a language model with a retrieval step over an external document index, described in a paper first posted in May 2020. Being retrievable is a precondition for being cited.

Citation

A source shown or linked by an AI answer as support for what it says. Counting citations is one of the measures AI SEO courses teach.

Brand mention

The naming of a brand, product or person in an AI answer, with or without a link.

Share of voice, share of answer

The proportion of answers to a defined set of prompts that cite or mention a brand, compared with competitors.

Prompt tracking

Running a fixed set of prompts through AI systems on a schedule and recording which sources are cited or mentioned; the AI search counterpart of rank tracking.

Entity

A distinct, identifiable thing, such as a person, organization, product or concept, as represented in a search engine's knowledge base. Entity SEO aims to make a brand's identity and relationships unambiguous to machines.

Knowledge Graph

Google's knowledge base of entities and their relationships. Google names it among the sources AI Mode draws on.

E-E-A-T

Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: the concept in Google's quality rater guidelines to which Experience was added in December 2022.

AI crawler

A bot that fetches web pages for an AI company, for search answers or for model training. OpenAI documents separate user agents, OAI-SearchBot for search and GPTBot for training, which a site can allow or block independently in robots.txt.

llms.txt

A proposed file at the root of a website that gives language models a concise markdown guide to its content, published by Jeremy Howard on September 3, 2024. It is a proposal, not a standard adopted by search engines.

Structured data

Machine-readable markup, usually schema.org vocabulary in JSON-LD, that describes a page's content. Several AI SEO courses teach it under technical GEO.

Parasite SEO

Publishing content on a high-authority third-party site to rank or be cited on the strength of that site's reputation. Some paid communities teach it.

Gray hat, black hat

Techniques that fall outside a search engine's published guidelines, to a lesser or greater degree. Some course sellers present them as risk settings rather than moral categories.

Are GEO, AEO and LLMO the same thing in an AI SEO course?

In an AI SEO course, GEO, AEO and LLMO overlap and are often used as synonyms, but the sources that coined or adopted them mean slightly different things: GEO is visibility in generated responses, AEO is extraction and citation by answer systems, and LLMO is how language models describe a brand. In dataset version 2.4 of the AI SEO course study, 32 of 46 eligible programs name GEO on their public page and 18 of 46 name AEO, while 37 of 49 teach LLM citation work whatever label they use. The GEO course and AEO course pages list them.

AI SEO course questions on this topic