GEO & AEO Glossary

Key terms for AI-readiness, generative engine optimization, and AI Visibility — defined clearly so you know what the scanner measures and why it matters.

Core Concepts

GEO: Generative Engine Optimization — the practice of optimizing content so it appears in AI-generated answers. Acronym, always uppercase. The dominant market term among SEO practitioners.
AEO: Answer Engine Optimization — optimizing content structure to appear as direct answers in AI-generated responses. Complements GEO: GEO focuses on technical access and extractability; AEO focuses on answer formatting and structure.
AI-readiness: How well a website's technical setup allows AI systems to access, understand, and use its content. Always hyphenated.
AI Visibility: Whether AI assistants (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) know about and recommend a website when users ask relevant questions. Two words, both capitalized, no hyphen.
AI-Readiness score: Numeric rating from 0 to 100 measuring a website's technical AI-readiness. Capital R when used as a product feature name.

Scanning & Reports

Scan: The action of analyzing a website against all AI-readiness parameters and computing scores. Used as both a verb and a noun.
Report: Complete analysis output containing scores, parameter results, evidence, and recommendations.
Parameter: An individual aspect of AI-readiness being evaluated — for example, robots.txt access or structured data quality. The friendly4AI scanner evaluates 48 parameters.
Evidence: Concrete, verifiable proof supporting a parameter result — detected tags, missing fields, or actual HTML snippets found during the scan.
Recommendation: Actionable suggestion to improve a specific parameter score, grouped by impact level.

Products & Features

GEO Scanner: The core product — evaluates websites against GEO and AEO parameters and produces two scores: AI-Readiness Score and AI Visibility Score.
AI Bot Accessibility: A report section that shows whether major AI crawlers are permitted by a site's robots.txt. Results are categorized as all-allowed, mixed, critical, or low-confidence.

Technical Terms

Structured data: Machine-readable markup (Schema.org, JSON-LD) embedded in web pages to help AI systems and search engines understand page content.
robots.txt: A file that tells web crawlers which pages they are allowed to access. AI crawlers check this file before indexing or training on a site's content.
Sitemap: An XML file listing all pages on a website for crawlers, helping them discover and index content efficiently.
llms.txt: A text file at /llms.txt describing a website's AI-readable content. Google officially stated (2026-05-16) that llms.txt is not used by its generative features. Independent studies find no measurable citation lift. Detected for completeness in friendly4AI reports — not a scored parameter.
Semantic HTML: Using HTML elements according to their meaning — headings, lists, articles — rather than only for visual styling. Helps AI systems parse and understand page structure.
AI crawlers: Bots used by AI companies, classified into three types: training bots (GPTBot, ClaudeBot) that collect data for model training, search bots (OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot) that power real-time AI search, and agent bots that perform user-requested actions.
OpenAPI: A specification for describing REST APIs. AI agents use OpenAPI definitions to discover and interact with a site's available actions.
Heading hierarchy: The structured use of heading elements (H1 through H6) in correct nesting order. A clear heading hierarchy helps AI systems understand the organization of a page.
Internal links: Links from one page on a website to another page on the same website. Adequate internal linking helps AI crawlers discover content and understand site structure.
Page metadata: HTML meta tags — including title, description, and canonical URL — that describe page content to crawlers and AI systems.
Entity: A named, real-world thing — a person, organization, product, or place — identified consistently across a website. Consistent entity mentions help AI systems build accurate knowledge representations.
FAQ schema: A Schema.org markup type (FAQPage + Question + Answer) that marks up question-and-answer content in a machine-readable format, making it extractable by AI systems as direct answers.
Author authority: Signals that establish the credibility and expertise of a page's author, such as a named author, bio, and links to an authoritative profile.

Engine Clusters & Scoring

Engine cluster: A named group of AI search engines that share a scoring behavior — for example, the "bing" cluster covers Bing and its Copilot syndication partners, and the "google" cluster covers Google Search and AI Overviews. Parameters tagged to a specific cluster carry extra weight in that cluster's sub-score.
Per-cluster sub-score: A weighted score computed for a single engine cluster (bing, google, perplexity, or claude) using only the parameters relevant to that cluster. Displayed alongside the composite AI-Readiness Score from v4.5 onward.
Advisory check: A parameter outcome where data is unavailable or inconclusive — for example, a Core Web Vitals result when CrUX has no field data, or a bot-reachability probe that times out. The parameter is excluded from the score denominator rather than scored as a fail, so the composite score is unaffected.
IndexNow: An open push protocol supported by Bing, Yandex, and other search engines that lets sites notify engines within seconds when a page changes. Faster re-indexing improves content freshness in AI-powered search results. Google does not participate in IndexNow.
Bot reachability: Whether AI search-bot user-agents (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot) can reach a site at the network layer — that is, they are not blocked by a WAF or CDN before the request reaches the origin. A network block is independent of robots.txt: a bot can be permitted by robots.txt yet still be blocked at the WAF.
Entity grounding: The practice of linking a page's structured data (Organization or Person schema) to authoritative external identity sources — Wikipedia, Wikidata, and LinkedIn — via the sameAs property. Grounded entities are resolved more accurately by AI knowledge graphs, which improves citation quality in AI-generated answers.
Page experience (Core Web Vitals): A Google ranking signal measuring real-user page performance via three Core Web Vitals: LCP (loading speed), CLS (visual stability), and INP (interaction responsiveness). Measured from Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) field data at the 75th percentile. Google uses page experience signals in AI Overviews ranking.

GEO & AEO Glossary

Key terms for AI-readiness, generative engine optimization, and AI Visibility — defined clearly so you know what the scanner measures and why it matters.

Core Concepts

GEO: Generative Engine Optimization — the practice of optimizing content so it appears in AI-generated answers. Acronym, always uppercase. The dominant market term among SEO practitioners.
AEO: Answer Engine Optimization — optimizing content structure to appear as direct answers in AI-generated responses. Complements GEO: GEO focuses on technical access and extractability; AEO focuses on answer formatting and structure.
AI-readiness: How well a website's technical setup allows AI systems to access, understand, and use its content. Always hyphenated.
AI Visibility: Whether AI assistants (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) know about and recommend a website when users ask relevant questions. Two words, both capitalized, no hyphen.
AI-Readiness score: Numeric rating from 0 to 100 measuring a website's technical AI-readiness. Capital R when used as a product feature name.

Scanning & Reports

Scan: The action of analyzing a website against all AI-readiness parameters and computing scores. Used as both a verb and a noun.
Report: Complete analysis output containing scores, parameter results, evidence, and recommendations.
Parameter: An individual aspect of AI-readiness being evaluated — for example, robots.txt access or structured data quality. The friendly4AI scanner evaluates 48 parameters.
Evidence: Concrete, verifiable proof supporting a parameter result — detected tags, missing fields, or actual HTML snippets found during the scan.
Recommendation: Actionable suggestion to improve a specific parameter score, grouped by impact level.

Products & Features

GEO Scanner: The core product — evaluates websites against GEO and AEO parameters and produces two scores: AI-Readiness Score and AI Visibility Score.
AI Bot Accessibility: A report section that shows whether major AI crawlers are permitted by a site's robots.txt. Results are categorized as all-allowed, mixed, critical, or low-confidence.

Technical Terms

Structured data: Machine-readable markup (Schema.org, JSON-LD) embedded in web pages to help AI systems and search engines understand page content.
robots.txt: A file that tells web crawlers which pages they are allowed to access. AI crawlers check this file before indexing or training on a site's content.
Sitemap: An XML file listing all pages on a website for crawlers, helping them discover and index content efficiently.
llms.txt: A text file at /llms.txt describing a website's AI-readable content. Google officially stated (2026-05-16) that llms.txt is not used by its generative features. Independent studies find no measurable citation lift. Detected for completeness in friendly4AI reports — not a scored parameter.
Semantic HTML: Using HTML elements according to their meaning — headings, lists, articles — rather than only for visual styling. Helps AI systems parse and understand page structure.
AI crawlers: Bots used by AI companies, classified into three types: training bots (GPTBot, ClaudeBot) that collect data for model training, search bots (OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot) that power real-time AI search, and agent bots that perform user-requested actions.
OpenAPI: A specification for describing REST APIs. AI agents use OpenAPI definitions to discover and interact with a site's available actions.
Heading hierarchy: The structured use of heading elements (H1 through H6) in correct nesting order. A clear heading hierarchy helps AI systems understand the organization of a page.
Internal links: Links from one page on a website to another page on the same website. Adequate internal linking helps AI crawlers discover content and understand site structure.
Page metadata: HTML meta tags — including title, description, and canonical URL — that describe page content to crawlers and AI systems.
Entity: A named, real-world thing — a person, organization, product, or place — identified consistently across a website. Consistent entity mentions help AI systems build accurate knowledge representations.
FAQ schema: A Schema.org markup type (FAQPage + Question + Answer) that marks up question-and-answer content in a machine-readable format, making it extractable by AI systems as direct answers.
Author authority: Signals that establish the credibility and expertise of a page's author, such as a named author, bio, and links to an authoritative profile.

Engine Clusters & Scoring

Engine cluster: A named group of AI search engines that share a scoring behavior — for example, the "bing" cluster covers Bing and its Copilot syndication partners, and the "google" cluster covers Google Search and AI Overviews. Parameters tagged to a specific cluster carry extra weight in that cluster's sub-score.
Per-cluster sub-score: A weighted score computed for a single engine cluster (bing, google, perplexity, or claude) using only the parameters relevant to that cluster. Displayed alongside the composite AI-Readiness Score from v4.5 onward.
Advisory check: A parameter outcome where data is unavailable or inconclusive — for example, a Core Web Vitals result when CrUX has no field data, or a bot-reachability probe that times out. The parameter is excluded from the score denominator rather than scored as a fail, so the composite score is unaffected.
IndexNow: An open push protocol supported by Bing, Yandex, and other search engines that lets sites notify engines within seconds when a page changes. Faster re-indexing improves content freshness in AI-powered search results. Google does not participate in IndexNow.
Bot reachability: Whether AI search-bot user-agents (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot) can reach a site at the network layer — that is, they are not blocked by a WAF or CDN before the request reaches the origin. A network block is independent of robots.txt: a bot can be permitted by robots.txt yet still be blocked at the WAF.
Entity grounding: The practice of linking a page's structured data (Organization or Person schema) to authoritative external identity sources — Wikipedia, Wikidata, and LinkedIn — via the sameAs property. Grounded entities are resolved more accurately by AI knowledge graphs, which improves citation quality in AI-generated answers.
Page experience (Core Web Vitals): A Google ranking signal measuring real-user page performance via three Core Web Vitals: LCP (loading speed), CLS (visual stability), and INP (interaction responsiveness). Measured from Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) field data at the 75th percentile. Google uses page experience signals in AI Overviews ranking.