AEO (answer engine optimization)
AEO, or answer engine optimization, is the practice of making a site's content easy for AI answer engines to retrieve, quote and attribute, rather than optimizing for a position in a list of links.
Glossary
AEO glossary
The answer engine optimization vocabulary, from the category terms to the machine-readability standards, defined in one sentence each and scoped to what each one means for a site that wants to be read by AI crawlers and agents.
GEO (generative engine optimization)
GEO, or generative engine optimization, is the practice of shaping content so that generative engines include and attribute it in the answers they compose.
AI visibility
AI visibility is how often and how prominently a brand appears in the answers AI assistants give to a defined set of prompts, measured by sampling those answers rather than by reading an engine's index.
llms.txt
llms.txt is a markdown file served at a site's root that gives large language models a curated index of the pages worth reading, with a short description of each.
Content-Signal
Content-Signal is a robots.txt comment directive that declares which uses of a site's content the owner permits: search indexing, AI input, and AI training.
AI crawler
An AI crawler is a bot such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot that fetches web pages either to train a language model or to retrieve sources for a generated answer.
Agent readiness
Agent readiness is how well a website can be used by an automated agent rather than a person: stable URLs, server-rendered content, structured data, explicit crawler rules and machine-readable endpoints.
MCP server card
An MCP server card is a JSON document that describes a Model Context Protocol server, so an AI client can discover what the server offers before connecting to it.
api-catalog (RFC 9727)
api-catalog is an IETF standard, RFC 9727, that defines /.well-known/api-catalog as the single place a site publishes a machine-readable list of the APIs it offers.
Markdown content negotiation
Markdown content negotiation is serving a markdown version of the same URL when a client asks for `text/markdown` in its Accept header, instead of publishing a second URL.
.well-known
/.well-known/ is the standard URI prefix, defined by RFC 8615, where a site publishes machine-readable metadata files at predictable paths.
AI share of voice
AI share of voice is the share of brand mentions in AI-generated answers for a defined set of prompts that belong to your brand rather than a competitor's.
Answer engine citation
An answer engine citation is a link or source reference an AI answer attaches to a claim, naming the page the model drew that part of the answer from.
Each entry ends with how to check the thing on a real site. To have all of them checked at once, run a free check, or see what the plans cover.