AI Marketing Glossary
Essential terminology for understanding AI visibility, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), and how to track your brand across AI search engines like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.
Last updated: December 2025
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of optimizing content, brand messaging, and digital presence to improve visibility and favorable mentions in AI-powered search engines and language models like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Grok. Unlike traditional SEO which targets Google rankings, GEO focuses on how AI systems perceive and recommend your brand.
AI Share of Voice
AI Share of Voice measures the percentage of AI-generated recommendations and responses that mention your brand compared to competitors for relevant industry queries. It quantifies your brand's presence in AI assistant outputs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, serving as the AI-era equivalent of traditional market share metrics.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the strategy of structuring content to appear in direct answer formats used by AI assistants, voice search, and featured snippets. AEO focuses on providing concise, authoritative answers that AI systems can extract and present directly to users without requiring click-throughs.
AI Brand Monitoring
AI Brand Monitoring is the systematic process of tracking and analyzing how artificial intelligence language models mention, describe, and recommend a brand in their responses. This includes monitoring visibility across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and other AI assistants to understand brand perception in the AI ecosystem.
LLM Optimization
LLM Optimization encompasses strategies and techniques for improving how Large Language Models perceive, understand, and recommend a brand or product. This includes optimizing content structure, citation sources, and entity clarity to increase favorable mentions in AI-generated responses from systems like GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini.
Zero-Click Search
Zero-Click Search refers to search queries where users receive complete answers directly from search results, AI assistants, or featured snippets without clicking through to any website. This phenomenon has grown significantly with AI chatbots providing comprehensive responses, fundamentally changing how brands must approach visibility and traffic acquisition.
AI Traffic Attribution
AI Traffic Attribution is the process of identifying and measuring website visitors who arrive via AI assistant recommendations, such as clicks from ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity responses. This traffic typically appears as 'direct' in analytics tools, requiring specialized tracking to properly attribute and analyze.
Citation Share
Citation Share measures the percentage of times a brand is cited or referenced when AI language models respond to relevant industry queries. It tracks not just mentions, but instances where AI explicitly attributes information or recommendations to your brand, indicating authoritative positioning in AI-generated content.
GPTBot
GPTBot is OpenAI's official web crawler that indexes content for ChatGPT and other OpenAI products. Identified by the user-agent string 'GPTBot/1.0', it crawls websites to gather training data and power ChatGPT's browsing capabilities. Allowing GPTBot access via robots.txt is essential for brands seeking visibility in ChatGPT recommendations.
PerplexityBot
PerplexityBot is Perplexity AI's web crawler that indexes content for their AI-powered answer engine. Unlike ChatGPT, Perplexity always cites sources in responses, making PerplexityBot crawl access crucial for earning citations. It crawls more aggressively than GPTBot and focuses on extracting quotable, citable content for real-time search results.
ClaudeBot
ClaudeBot is Anthropic's web crawler that collects data for Claude AI models. Using user-agent strings 'ClaudeBot' and 'anthropic-ai', it operates more conservatively than GPTBot or PerplexityBot. Claude relies heavily on training data rather than real-time browsing, making ClaudeBot's historical crawls important for long-term visibility in Claude's recommendations.
llms.txt
llms.txt is an emerging file standard that provides AI crawlers with a structured, machine-readable summary of a website's key information. Placed at the domain root (yourdomain.com/llms.txt), it helps AI systems quickly understand your brand, products, and value proposition without crawling your entire site. Think of it as a robots.txt for AI understanding, not just access.
Entity Optimization
Entity optimization is the practice of establishing a clear, consistent, and authoritative digital identity for your brand across all sources AI systems reference. This includes knowledge graph presence, Wikipedia entries, consistent naming across platforms, and schema.org markup—all helping AI confidently identify and recommend your brand.
Topical Authority
Topical authority is the measure of a website's expertise and comprehensive coverage of a specific subject area. For AI visibility, building topical authority means creating deep, interconnected content clusters that establish your brand as the go-to expert on topics relevant to your industry, making AI more likely to cite and recommend you.
E-E-A-T
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness—Google's framework for evaluating content quality. For AI visibility, E-E-A-T signals help AI systems determine which sources to cite and recommend, making it essential to demonstrate real-world experience, expert credentials, authoritative standing, and trust signals across your content.
AI Crawler
AI crawlers are web bots operated by AI companies to index content for language models and AI-powered search. Key crawlers include GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot (Perplexity AI), and Google-Extended (Google). Managing access via robots.txt determines whether AI systems can access your content for training and real-time responses.
Google-Extended
Google-Extended is Google's user-agent specifically for AI training data collection, separate from Googlebot used for Search indexing. Blocking Google-Extended prevents your content from training Gemini and other Google AI products but does not affect Google Search rankings or AI Overviews. It's the rare AI crawler that lets you opt out of training without losing search visibility.
AI Content Optimization
AI content optimization is the practice of structuring and writing content specifically for extraction by AI systems. This includes using inverted pyramid structure, creating 40-60 word answer blocks, writing question-based headers, avoiding pronouns in opening sentences, and formatting information in easily quotable chunks that AI can cite directly.
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