GEO & SEO Glossary
This glossary defines the twelve terms that decide search visibility in the AI era — GEO, AEO, LLMs, AI Overviews, E-E-A-T and more — each in plain language, for the marketing and SEO teams adapting to answer engines.
What is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)?
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of making your brand visible and cited within AI-driven search results such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google’s AI Overviews, where visibility is earned through accurate mentions and precise answers. Where classic SEO earns a position in a list of links, GEO earns a mention or a citation inside the answer itself.
GEO does not replace SEO — the two are complementary, and much of the work overlaps. Answer-first writing, one consistently named entity, sourced figures and content served as plain HTML are what make a page quotable by an engine, and those same properties help it rank.
What is AEO, and what is an answer engine?
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so that answer engines — systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews, which respond with a direct answer instead of a list of links — can extract, quote and attribute it.
In practice AEO and GEO describe the same discipline from two angles, and the terms are often used interchangeably; which one is searched varies by market, while the work is identical. The core of it: the heading is the question a reader would type, and the first sentence after it is a complete, self-contained answer.
What is an LLM (large language model)?
A large language model (LLM) is an AI system trained on very large volumes of text to understand and generate language — the technology behind conversational engines such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity.
An LLM answers from two sources: what it absorbed in training and what it retrieves live from the web. That makes mentions and citations in LLM answers the new visibility for a brand — when an engine references your brand it treats it as a relevant player, and users read that as a signal of authority.
What are Google AI Overviews?
AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries Google shows above its classic search results, assembled from pages in Google’s existing index and citing a small set of sources as links — often answering the query before any result is clicked.
Because an AI Overview is built on the ordinary index, the way in is ordinary crawlability: indexed, extractable content. Published measurements of how many queries trigger one genuinely disagree, so treat any single percentage with caution. Eligibility is controlled by the Google-Extended crawler token, which does not affect classic rankings.
What is AI visibility, and how is share of voice measured?
AI visibility is how often, how prominently and how accurately a brand appears in AI-generated answers; share of voice expresses that presence as a percentage, measured against competitors across a fixed set of tracked prompts.
Because LLM answers are not stable ranked lists, visibility is sampled rather than read from a console: the same prompts are put to each engine at intervals, and mentions, citations and sentiment are counted. It is the GEO counterpart of a rank tracker — how progress on citations becomes a KPI rather than an anecdote.
What is a content score?
A content score is a rating, typically from 0 to 100, of how completely a page covers its topic, based on the terms, questions and subtopics that readers and search engines expect the page to address.
Semji assigns a Content Score to every page and pairs it with the page’s traffic and conversion potential, so teams optimize first where a higher score buys the most business impact. A score is a compass, not a guarantee: it shows where coverage is thin, and the writing still has to be worth citing.
What is topical authority?
Topical authority is the credibility a website earns by covering one subject deeply, accurately and coherently, which makes search engines and LLMs more likely to rank it, cite it and recommend it on that subject than a site that treats it in passing.
It is built with clusters: a pillar page defining the subject, supporting articles answering its specific questions, and internal links binding them together. In AI-driven search the same structure pays twice — engines attribute answers to entities they can identify, so the site that owns a topic is the one named inside the answer.
What does E-E-A-T mean in SEO?
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness — the four criteria Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines use to describe what trustworthy content looks like, with trust named as the most important of the four.
E-E-A-T is not a direct ranking factor but a description of what Google’s systems are tuned to reward: named authors with verifiable credentials, first-hand experience, cited sources and accurate claims. The same signals serve GEO — an engine attributing a quote needs a clearly identified author and entity inside the content it lifts.
What is structured data (schema.org)?
Structured data is machine-readable markup, most often JSON-LD using the schema.org vocabulary, that tells search engines exactly what a page describes — an organization, an article, a FAQ — so they can display and attribute it correctly.
One rule decides whether it helps or harms: structured data may only describe what is in the served HTML. Markup claiming answers a reader cannot see is the one structured-data error that gets rich results manually suppressed. Semji’s own site emits an Organization and WebSite block on every page, which is what resolves “Semji” to one company for every engine that reads it.
What is hreflang, and why does it matter?
hreflang is an HTML attribute that declares which language and region each version of a page targets, so a search engine can send a French-speaking user to the French URL rather than to the English one.
The annotations only work as a cluster: every page must list every alternate including itself, the alternates must link back reciprocally, and an x-default names the fallback. One broken direction and engines are free to ignore the whole set — which is how the wrong language ends up ranking in the wrong country.
What is crawl budget?
Crawl budget is the number of URLs a search engine will fetch from a website within a given period, determined by how fast and reliably the site responds and by how much the engine estimates its content matters.
Small sites rarely exhaust it; large ones waste it invisibly — redirect chains, duplicate URLs, parameter variants and dead links all consume fetches that fresh pages needed. Fast static HTML, one canonical URL per page and a sitemap that lists only what the build actually emits keep the budget spent on content.
What is zero-click search, and does it matter?
A zero-click search is a query resolved directly on the results page — by a featured snippet, a knowledge panel or an AI Overview — so the user gets what they came for without visiting any website.
Decisions still happen in search, with or without the click. A brand that appears in featured snippets, AI Overviews and LLM citations influences purchase decisions, builds authority and stays top-of-mind even when users never reach its site — which is why GEO treats the answer itself, not the visit, as the surface to win.
Turn definitions into visibility
Semji’s platform and GEO consultants help your team apply these levers — from content scores to citations — across ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews.