Glossary
The language of AI search, in plain terms.
The vocabulary around generative engine optimization gets jargony fast. Here is what the words actually mean for an independent music business.
- Generative engine optimization (GEO)
- The practice of getting AI assistants to name, cite, and recommend your business in their answers. The AI-era counterpart to SEO, aimed at the answer rather than a list of results.
- AI assistant / answer engine
- A tool that answers a question directly in natural language instead of returning a list of search results. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI answers are the most common examples.
- Large language model (LLM)
- The kind of AI system that powers AI assistants. It generates language based on patterns learned from large amounts of text, which is why clearly written, readable information about you matters so much.
- Retrieval
- When an AI assistant fetches current information from the web at the moment of a question and uses it to answer. Most of your AI visibility is won or lost here, because it reflects the live web rather than old training data.
- Training data
- The snapshot of text a model learned from when it was built. It updates slowly and is not where day-to-day visibility work should focus.
- Grounding
- Tying an answer to specific, verifiable sources rather than the model guessing. Businesses that are easy to ground, with clear and corroborated facts, are easier to recommend.
- Citation
- A source an AI assistant links or refers to in support of its answer. Being citable, with clear pages and trusted mentions, is central to being recommended.
- Hallucination
- When an AI assistant states something untrue or invented. Clear, consistent, well-sourced information about your business reduces the chance a model gets your details wrong.
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- The older practice of ranking your pages in traditional search results. It shares groundwork with GEO, but targets clicks on links rather than mentions inside an answer.
- Structured data / schema markup
- Behind-the-scenes code, usually schema.org in JSON-LD, that tells machines exactly what your business is, where it is, and what it offers. It removes guesswork for search engines and AI systems.
- NAP (name, address, phone)
- Your core business details. Keeping them identical everywhere they appear is one of the cheapest, highest-return moves for local AI visibility.
- E-E-A-T
- Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust. A shorthand for the credibility signals, like real authorship and reputation, that make a source safe for systems to rely on.
- Google Business Profile
- Your free business listing on Google. A complete, accurate, claimed profile feeds both traditional local search and the AI answers layered on top of it.
- Crawler / bot
- An automated program that reads web pages. AI companies run crawlers (such as OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot) to gather and index content for their AI assistants.
- llms.txt
- An emerging convention: a plain text file at the root of a site that points AI systems to its most important, machine-readable content. A small, forward-looking signal of GEO readiness.
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