- AI assistant
- A tool that answers questions in written sentences, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot or Perplexity.
- AI crawler
- A program an AI company runs to read web pages, for training, for search or because a user asked.
- AI Overview
- The AI-written summary Google shows above some search results.
- AI search auditing
- Checking what AI tools say about a business and tracing each wrong statement back to its source.
- Answer engine optimization (AEO)
- Another name for Generative Engine Optimization.
- Citation
- A link an assistant shows to a page it used for its answer.
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
- The work of making sure AI assistants can find, read and correctly repeat information about a business.
- Grounding
- The pages or data an AI answer is based on, as opposed to what the model remembers.
- Hallucination
- A statement an AI model presents as fact that is not supported by its sources.
- JSON-LD
- A block of data in a web page that states facts in a form machines can read.
- Knowledge Graph
- Google’s own database of facts about people, places and businesses.
- Large language model (LLM)
- The kind of AI model behind these assistants. It writes text one piece at a time from patterns it learned.
- LLM brand monitoring
- Tracking what AI models say about a business or brand over time.
- llms.txt
- A proposed plain-text file that points AI tools to a site’s most useful pages.
- Local SEO
- Making sure a local business’s name, address, phone number and hours are correct and easy to find in search.
- Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
- An assistant fetching pages first and then writing its answer from them.
- robots.txt
- The file on a website that tells crawlers what they may fetch.
- schema.org
- The shared vocabulary used in structured data.
- Structured data
- Facts written in a fixed format, such as JSON-LD, so that software doesn’t have to guess.
- Training data
- The text a model learned from, gathered up to a cutoff date.
- Verified fact
- In FactHound, a fact about your business that you have confirmed is true.