The AI search glossary. No fog.
This field has a terminology problem — five names for the same discipline and a fog of jargon around simple ideas. Here’s every term that matters, defined in a sentence, kept current as the field moves.
Illustrative preview — the goal of every engagement, not a promise of placement.
AI Engine Optimization (AEO)
The practice of making a business visible, verifiable, and recommendable to AI engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.
Answer engine
Any system that responds to a query with a direct answer rather than a list of links — AI chatbots and Google’s AI features alike.
Answer Share
The percentage of AI-generated answers in a category and market that name a given business; the headline metric of AEO.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
An alternative industry name for AEO-style work, emphasizing generative AI systems; same territory, different label.
LLM Optimization (LLMO)
Another synonym in circulation for optimizing visibility within large-language-model answers.
The Recommendation Stack™
AnswerStack’s five-layer model of the signals AI engines use to choose businesses: entity data, review authority, answerable content, machine readability, third-party corroboration.
The 5 Stages of AI Visibility
A maturity model for AI presence: Invisible → Indexed → Mentioned → Recommended → Default Answer.
Entity
The machine-readable identity of a business — the thing engines must recognize and trust before they can recommend it.
NAP consistency
Agreement of Name, Address, and Phone across every source; inconsistency is penalized harder by AI engines than by Google.
Citation (local)
A mention of a business’s core details on a third-party site or directory — raw material for entity trust.
AI citation
An instance of an AI engine referencing or attributing a source in its answer; earning them is a core AEO outcome.
Review velocity
The rate and recency of new genuine reviews — a steady pulse engines weight above raw totals.
Schema markup / structured data
Code vocabulary (Schema.org) that hands engines your facts directly — services, hours, FAQs — instead of leaving them to inference.
Machine readability
How easily engines can parse a site: structure, speed, clean markup, and structured data together.
Knowledge graph
An engine’s internal web of entities and relationships; being represented accurately in it underpins recommendation.
AI Overviews
Google’s generated answers shown atop results — present on a majority of U.S. queries and drawing on classic ranking signals.
Zero-click search
A query resolved on the results or answer surface itself, with no site visit — why visibility now matters beyond traffic.
Chunking
Structuring content in self-contained, liftable blocks so engines can quote a section accurately without the whole page.
Grounding / RAG
Retrieval-augmented generation — engines fetching live sources to ground answers; the mechanism that makes citable content winnable.
Answer-first content
Pages structured to answer a real question directly in the opening lines — the format engines cite and customers trust.
The Recommendation Stack™.
Five signal layers decide who AI engines name. Every engagement builds them in order — tap a layer to see the work behind it.
Layer 1 is the foundation — nothing above it works if the base disagrees with itself.
The 5 Stages of AI Visibility.
Every business sits on exactly one rung right now. Which one decides what to fix first — and roughly 99% are stuck below Stage 4.
Invisible
Engines can’t confirm you exist. Data missing, wrong, or contradicting itself.
Indexed
You exist to the machines, but you’re never chosen. In the data, absent from the answer.
Mentioned
You surface occasionally — usually in lists, rarely as the recommendation.
Recommended
Engines actively name you in your market. This is where the phone changes.
Default Answer
First name, consistently, across engines. The position competitors can’t buy overnight.
An entire channel moved.
Most businesses never got the memo.
of consumers now use AI to find local businesses — up from 6% a year ago.
BrightLocal, 2026of businesses ever get recommended by ChatGPT across 350K+ locations.
SOCi, 2026overlap between Google’s local winners and the businesses AI actually names.
SOCi, 2026of local businesses have no AI strategy at all. That’s the window.
Industry surveys, 2026Six promises — all checkable
before you pay us a dollar.
Published pricing
Every price on the page. No quote calls, no setup-fee ambush.
Month-to-month
No contracts. We re-earn the business every single month.
You own everything
Site, domain, content, data, CRM — in writing, from day one.
Free audit, no strings
A real human review, yours to keep whether you hire us or not.
Honest timelines
Visibility compounds over 8–12+ weeks. We say so before you buy.
We name what didn’t work
Every report lists the misses. Trust is built in the down months.
Find out where you stand before you spend a dollar.
The free audit shows your Answer Share, your visibility stage, and your first three fixes — yours to keep either way.
Questions owners actually ask.
Because the field is 18 months old and every vendor wants to own the vocabulary. AEO, GEO, LLMO, AI SEO — same territory. We use AEO consistently and define the rest here rather than pretending ours is the only word.
Three: Answer Share (are you named?), review velocity (the gate), and entity consistency (the foundation). The rest is useful context; those three decide outcomes.
Monthly, as the field moves. If a term here goes stale or a new one matters, it changes — a glossary that rots is worse than none.