- AI search
- Search engines and their reports
- Google's content rules
- Local listings and profiles
- Your website, technically
- Ownership and accounts
AI search
Generative engine optimization (GEO)
The work of making a business's website and listings easy for AI assistants to find, read and cite when they write an answer. The term comes from a 2023 research paper titled "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization." Google says optimizing for its own AI features is still SEO. Bing's Webmaster Guidelines say GEO focuses on whether content is eligible for grounding and reference in AI answers. Our post on what generative engine optimization is covers the paper and what the work involves.
Answer engine optimization (AEO)
Another name for the same idea as GEO. "Answer engine" is a common name for an AI tool that replies with a written answer instead of a list of links. Google's guide to its generative AI features names both AEO and GEO and says that, from its side, optimizing for them is still SEO.
Large language model (LLM)
An AI system trained on very large amounts of text that writes language in reply to a question or instruction. The paper that coined GEO describes generative engines as search tools that use large language models to gather and summarize information from several sources into one answer.
Grounding
Having an AI pull in outside sources, such as current search results, and base its answer on them instead of only on what it learned in training. Google's AI guide calls the technique retrieval-augmented generation, also known as grounding, and says it improves the quality, accuracy and freshness of AI responses. Bing's guidelines use the word for the pages Copilot draws on and cites.
Citation (in an AI answer)
A link to a source page shown with an AI answer. Bing Webmaster Tools counts how often a site's pages are cited in Microsoft Copilot and Bing's AI summaries. In local search the same word means something else; see citation under Local listings and profiles.
AI Overview
An AI-written summary that Google shows in some search results, with links to the pages it drew on. Google describes it as a snapshot with key information and links to dig deeper. A page must be indexed and eligible to show a snippet before an AI Overview can link to it, and Google says there are no extra requirements beyond that.
AI Mode
Google's AI search mode, where a person can keep asking follow-up questions. Google says it is particularly helpful when a question needs further exploration, reasoning or comparison. Like AI Overviews, it may run many related searches behind the scenes, which Google calls query fan-out, and it links to the pages it used.
ChatGPT search
ChatGPT's web search feature, which answers questions with current information and links to sources. OpenAI says ChatGPT may search on its own when a question needs current information and sometimes sends rewritten queries to partner search providers. To be eligible, a site has to let OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot crawler in, and OpenAI says placement is not guaranteed.
Microsoft Copilot
Microsoft's AI assistant. Bing's Webmaster Guidelines cover Copilot together with Bing search and say both rely on the same core crawling, indexing and ranking foundation as traditional search.
Perplexity
An AI search tool that answers questions and links the pages it used. Its crawler, PerplexityBot, gathers the pages that Perplexity can show and link to in its results.
Search engines and their reports
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Work that helps search engines find, understand and show a website's pages. Bing's Webmaster Guidelines describe it as improving a site's technical quality, clarity and accessibility so Bing can discover and evaluate the content, and they say SEO comes with no guarantee of rankings or traffic.
Index and indexing
Google's index is the large database of pages Google has read and stored. Indexing is the step where Google analyzes a page and adds it. Only an indexed page can appear in Google's results, including as a link in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and Google says it does not guarantee that it will crawl, index or serve any page.
Search Console
Google's tools and reports for site owners. Google says they help you measure your site's Search traffic and performance and fix issues. Access starts with someone proving they own the site, which Google calls verification.
Generative AI performance report
A Search Console report that counts how many times links to your site were shown in Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. Impressions are its only measure, broken down by page, country, date and device. Google says it reached all websites worldwide on August 31, 2026, though a site with few AI impressions may not see it. Our post on what nobody can guarantee in AI Overviews covers what it leaves out.
Search generative AI control
A Search Console setting, under Settings, that includes or excludes a site's links and content from AI Overviews, AI Mode and the generative AI features in Discover. Include is the default. Google says the setting does not affect regular Search results or AI training, and that all websites worldwide have had it since August 31, 2026.
Bing Webmaster Tools
Microsoft's tools and reports for site owners, the Bing counterpart to Search Console. Its AI Performance report counts how often your pages are cited in Microsoft Copilot and Bing's AI summaries, with a sample of the search phrases behind those citations. Microsoft says those numbers do not show ranking or placement inside an answer.
IndexNow
An open protocol that lets a website tell participating search engines the moment a page is added, changed or deleted, instead of waiting for a crawler to find out. The IndexNow site lists the search engines that take part, Microsoft Bing among them. Google is not one of them. Bing's guidelines recommend it.
Title link
Google's name for the clickable headline of a search result. Google builds it from the page's title element, its main heading and other text on and about the page, so it may not match the title you wrote word for word.
Meta description
A short summary of a page, written into the page's code for search engines. Google says it sometimes uses the meta description for the snippet under a result, when it describes the page more accurately than text taken from the page itself.
Rich result
Google's name for a search result with extra features, such as star ratings or event dates, made possible by structured data. Google says markup alone does not guarantee a rich result will show. It also says the FAQ rich result stopped appearing in Search starting May 7, 2026.
Google's content rules
Helpful, people-first content
Google's phrase, from its guide "Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content," for content made mainly to help people rather than to manipulate search rankings. Google contrasts it with search engine-first content, made mainly to gain rankings.
E-E-A-T
Short for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, the qualities Google uses to describe reliable content. Google says trust is the most important of the four, and that E-E-A-T itself is not a specific ranking factor.
Scaled content abuse
Google's spam policy against generating many pages mainly to manipulate search rankings. One of its examples is using generative AI to produce many pages without adding value for users. Google says sites that break its spam policies may rank lower or not appear in results at all.
Doorway abuse
Google's spam policy against sites or pages created to rank for specific, similar searches. One of its examples is multiple domains or pages aimed at specific regions or cities that funnel visitors to one page. The nine signs of a vapor proposal include a page for every nearby town.
Local listings and profiles
Google Business Profile
Google's listing for a local business on Google Search and Maps. Google says it lets you manage how your business shows up there at no charge, including your hours, phone, website, photos and reviews. Its AI guide says a Business Profile can help a business be visible in AI responses. Our post on who owns your website, domain and Google profile shows how to check whose name it is in.
Service-area business
Google's term for a business that visits or delivers to customers directly but does not serve them at its business address, such as a plumber. Google allows up to 20 service areas and says a service-area business should hide its address from customers.
NAP
Short for name, address and phone number. It is industry shorthand, not a platform term, used when checking that a business's details match on its website, its Google Business Profile and its other listings. Google's guidelines ask that a business be represented the way it is consistently represented and recognized in the real world.
Citation (in local search)
A listing or mention of a business's name, address and phone on another site, such as a directory or a review site. This is industry usage. It is a different thing from a citation in an AI answer, which is a link to a source.
Local pack
Industry name for the short list of businesses, usually shown with a map, that Google returns for a search like "plumber near me." Google calls these local results and says they appear on Google Maps and Search.
Relevance, distance and prominence
The three things Google names for ranking local results. Relevance is how well a Business Profile matches what someone searched for. Distance is how far the business is from the person searching. Prominence is how well known the business is, based partly on how many websites link to it and how many reviews it has. Google says there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.
Review
A customer's rating and comments about a business, such as on its Google Business Profile, where an owner can read and reply to them. Google says more reviews and positive ratings can help a business's local ranking.
Your website, technically
Crawler
A program that search engines and AI companies send out to read web pages. Google's is Googlebot and Bing's is Bingbot. Some AI companies, OpenAI among them, run separate crawlers for search and for training their models, and blocking one does not block the other. Our post on whether your website is blocking ChatGPT lists the main ones.
User agent
The name a crawler or browser gives when it asks a website for a page. Rules in robots.txt are addressed to these names, such as Googlebot or OAI-SearchBot. Google warns that the name can be faked, and Google and Perplexity both publish IP addresses for checking that a visitor is really their crawler.
Googlebot
Google's crawler for Google Search. Google says its Googlebot rules cover Search and all Search features, which include AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google-Extended is a separate robots.txt name that controls whether Google may use your pages to train Gemini models and to ground answers; Google says it does not affect a site's inclusion in Google Search.
OAI-SearchBot
OpenAI's crawler for ChatGPT search. OpenAI says sites that block it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links. GPTBot is a different OpenAI crawler, tied to training its AI models, and OpenAI says each setting is independent of the other.
PerplexityBot
Perplexity's crawler. Perplexity says it surfaces and links websites in Perplexity's search results, is not used to collect content for training AI models, and recommends allowing it in robots.txt.
robots.txt
A plain text file at the top level of a website that tells crawlers which pages they may visit. The standard that defines it says its rules are not access control, so it is a request, not a lock. Google says it is not a way to keep a page out of Google; that takes noindex.
llms.txt
A proposed Markdown file at the root of a website that gives AI tools a short summary of the site and links to its main pages. Jeremy Howard proposed it in September 2024, and it is not an adopted standard. Google says Google Search ignores these files, so creating one neither helps nor hurts visibility there. Our llms.txt post covers what to spend the money on instead.
Sitemap
A file that lists a site's pages, and sometimes when each one last changed, so search engines can find them. Google says a sitemap helps discovery but does not guarantee that everything in it will be crawled and indexed.
noindex
A tag or header that tells search engines not to show a page in their results. A page Google does not index cannot appear as a link in AI Overviews or AI Mode either. Bing says noindex keeps a page out of Bing search, Copilot and grounding results.
nosnippet
A tag that tells Google not to show a text snippet or video preview for a page. Google says it also keeps the page's content from being used as a direct input for AI Overviews and AI Mode. Bing says it can limit the quality of Copilot citations.
Canonical URL
The one address Google picks as the most representative from a set of duplicate pages. You can state a preference with a rel="canonical" tag, a redirect or a sitemap, but Google says a canonical preference is a hint, not a rule.
Redirect (301)
An instruction that sends visitors and search engines from an old address to a new one. A 301 is permanent, and Google treats it as a signal to show the new address in results; a 302 is temporary. Google recommends a permanent server-side redirect whenever possible.
Structured data (schema markup)
Code added to a page that labels its facts in a standard format, such as a business's name, address and hours. Google defines it as a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying its content, recommends the JSON-LD format and says most Search structured data uses the schema.org vocabulary. Google's AI guide says structured data is not required for its generative AI features.
Ownership and accounts
Domain
Your web address, such as geobros.ai. ICANN compares a domain name to a street address. Whoever is listed as the registrant holds the rights to it, and ICANN warns that a developer may have registered it with their own contact details. Our post on who owns your website, domain and Google profile shows how to check.
Registrar
A company that registers domain names, such as GoDaddy or Namecheap. ICANN runs an accreditation system for registrars. The registrar account that holds your domain is the one that controls it.
ICANN Lookup and RDAP
ICANN Lookup, at lookup.icann.org, is ICANN's public tool for looking up a domain's registration data. It runs on RDAP, the Registration Data Access Protocol, which replaced WHOIS as the official source for generic domain registration data on January 28, 2025. Registrars must publish the registrar and the expiration date, but the registrant's name may be redacted.
DNS
The Domain Name System, the internet's directory that links a domain name to the numeric addresses computers use to find each other. ICANN describes it as a system designed to make the internet accessible to people. A domain's DNS records say where its website and its email go, which is why one can move without the other.
Hosting
The service and the account where a website's files live and run. If the hosting account is in a vendor's name, the site lives in the vendor's account, not yours.
Managed platform
A vendor that builds a business's website, hosts it on its own system and runs it for a monthly fee. In most cases the site itself does not survive leaving, while the domain and email usually do. Our post on leaving a managed website platform walks through what survives.
Sources. Pranjal Aggarwal, Vishvak Murahari, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashwin Kalyan, Karthik Narasimhan and Ameet Deshpande, "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization," arXiv, first posted November 16, 2023, version 3 June 28, 2024, arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735. Google Search Central, "Google's Guide to Optimizing for Generative AI Features on Google Search," published May 15, 2026, last updated July 10, 2026, developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide. Google Search Central, "AI Features and Your Website," last updated December 10, 2025, developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features. Google Search Help, AI Overviews in Google Search, support.google.com/websearch/answer/14901683. Google Search Central, "In-Depth Guide to How Google Search Works," last updated December 18, 2025, developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/how-search-works. 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Google Search Central, "Control Your Snippets in Search Results," last updated April 20, 2026, developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/snippet. Google Search Central, robots meta tag specifications, noindex and nosnippet, last updated March 24, 2026, developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots-meta-tag. Google Search Central, "Introduction to robots.txt," developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots/intro. Google Search Central, sitemaps overview, developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/sitemaps/overview. Google Search Central, canonicalization, last updated August 20, 2026, developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/canonicalization. Google Search Central, "Redirects and Google Search," last updated April 14, 2026, developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/301-redirects. 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