Glossary
The AI visibility & GEO glossary
The vocabulary of the AI-answer era, defined plainly and honestly. Every definition states only what is true — the same standard we hold every number in a GeoMagics scorecard to.
- AI visibilityAI visibility is the degree to which a brand is mentioned, cited, or recommended inside the answers generated by AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity.
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)GEO is the practice of improving how generative AI engines represent and recommend a brand when they answer users' questions — optimizing to be cited inside the answer, not merely ranked as a link.
- Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)AEO is optimization aimed specifically at being the sourced answer to a direct question inside answer engines and AI Overviews — closely related to GEO, with an emphasis on question-shaped, extractable content.
- LLM citationAn LLM citation is a reference an AI answer engine attaches to a claim in its answer — the source it credits — which is a primary driver of both traffic and trust in the AI-search era.
- AI answer engineAn AI answer engine is a system that responds to a user's question with a synthesized, written answer — e.g. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Grok and Google's AI Overviews — rather than only a list of links.
- llms.txtllms.txt is a proposed plain-text file at a site's root that offers AI systems a curated, machine-readable map of the site's most important content — an emerging GEO signal analogous to robots.txt and sitemap.xml.
- Structured data (schema.org)Structured data is machine-readable markup (usually schema.org JSON-LD) that states explicitly what a page is about, removing ambiguity for search and answer engines and improving how a brand's entity is understood.
- Digital twin (of a business)A digital twin is a structured, provenance-tracked model of a business and its market — every fact carrying its source and its time — used to ground honest measurement and reliable AI-assisted recommendations.
- Confidence interval (in AI-visibility measurement)A confidence interval is the honest range around a measured AI-visibility score that accounts for sampling noise — GeoMagics reports a Wilson interval so a number is never presented as more certain than the data supports.
- Share of voice (in AI answers)Share of voice in AI answers is the proportion of relevant AI-engine answers in which a brand appears (or is recommended) relative to its competitors — a comparative measure of standing in the answer layer.