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SEO & GEO glossary

71 definitions of the vocabulary you will hear in a pitch, an audit or a reporting meeting — from crawl budget to AI Overviews. Every entry answers the question first, then explains why it matters and what it changes in practice.

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A

AI crawlers

AI crawlers are the bots that fetch web pages for AI companies — GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended — for training, for retrieval, or for both.

AI Overview

An AI Overview is a generated summary Google places above the organic results for some queries, citing a handful of sources. It absorbs a share of the clicks the first results used to receive.

E

Entity

An entity is a distinct thing a search engine or model recognises — a company, a person, a product, a place — independently of the words used to describe it.

F

Featured snippet

A featured snippet is a passage lifted from a page and displayed above the organic results to answer a query directly, with attribution and a link.

G

GEO (generative engine optimization)

GEO is the practice of being found, trusted and quoted inside AI-generated answers — in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot or Google's AI Overviews — rather than ranked in a list of links.

L

llms.txt

llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file at a site's root that summarises what the site is and lists its canonical entry points for large language models. It is a convention, not a standard.

R

Rich result

A rich result is an organic listing enhanced with extra detail drawn from structured data: review stars, prices, availability, event dates, recipes or breadcrumbs.

S

SERP features

SERP features are the non-standard result blocks a search engine inserts: featured snippets, People Also Ask, image and video packs, map packs, shopping carousels and AI Overviews.