AI Search Terms, Defined in Plain Language

Answer engine optimization (AEO) is an industry term, with no single agreed definition, for shaping web content so AI answer tools can find it, read it accurately and use it in a reply.

In practice it means publishing clear, sourced answers to the questions buyers actually ask, on pages those tools are allowed to reach. It can make a business easier to quote, but no one can promise that an assistant will name it.

What answer engine optimization means in practice

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is an industry term for making content easy for generative AI tools to find, understand and draw on when they write an answer.

Marketers use GEO and AEO loosely and often interchangeably. The label matters less than whether your pages answer real buyer questions clearly.

How AEO content differs from SEO content

AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that Google shows in some search results, when its systems determine they add to classic Search, to help people get to the gist of a complicated topic or question more quickly.

Google says that to appear in its AI features, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, and that there are no additional technical requirements.

Source: AI Features and Your Website

AI Mode is a Google Search experience that answers a question with an AI-powered response, includes links to the web, and lets people go deeper with follow-up questions.

Google describes it as expanding what AI Overviews can do with more advanced reasoning, and says it sometimes shows a set of web links instead when it lacks confidence in an AI response.

Source: Get AI-powered responses with AI Mode in Google Search

An AI citation is a link or source reference that an AI assistant attaches to its answer to show where a piece of information came from.

OpenAI's help page for ChatGPT search says responses that use web search may include citations, and that search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated or incorrect.

Why ChatGPT may not recommend your business

Source: Searching the web with ChatGPT

Query fan-out is a technique in which an AI search feature issues multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources to build a single response.

Google says both AI Overviews and AI Mode may use it. For a business, it is a reason to answer the smaller related questions around a topic, not only the headline one.

Source: AI Features and Your Website

A large language model (LLM) is a type of AI model that produces text by predicting a token or sequence of tokens, and it can predict thousands of tokens in a row.

Google's own course on the subject says LLMs hallucinate, meaning their predictions often contain mistakes, so an answer can read smoothly and still be wrong.

Source: LLMs: What's a large language model?

A featured snippet is a special box in Google Search results that reverses the usual format of a result, showing the descriptive excerpt from a page first.

Google's systems decide whether a page would make a good featured snippet for a given search, and a site can opt out with the nosnippet rule.

Source: Featured Snippets and Your Website

A Google Business Profile is a free listing that lets a business manage how it shows up on Google Maps and Google Search.

Once a profile is verified, the business can make changes to it on Google Maps and Search.

Source: Get started with Google Business Profile

In search, an entity is a distinct, identifiable thing, such as a business, person, place, product or service, that a system can recognize as the same thing wherever it is mentioned.

Writing your business name, address and service names the same way across your site, profiles and listings makes those mentions easier to connect.

Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page's content, so a machine can tell what the page is about.

Google supports three formats, JSON-LD, Microdata and RDFa, and generally recommends JSON-LD. Google says adding structured data can enable search results that are more engaging to users.

Source: Intro to How Structured Data Markup Works

Schema markup is structured data written with the schema.org vocabulary, a shared set of terms for describing what a web page and the things on it are.

Schema.org says its vocabulary can be used with the Microdata, RDFa or JSON-LD formats, and that the extra tags help search engines understand content and display it in a useful, relevant way.

Source: Schema.org: Getting Started

JSON-LD is a JSON-based format for writing linked data, published as a W3C Recommendation, and it is one of the formats a site can use to add schema.org markup to its pages.

JSON-LD 1.1 became a W3C Recommendation on July 16, 2020, and was written to supersede JSON-LD 1.0.

Source: JSON-LD 1.1

FAQ structured data is markup that uses the schema.org FAQPage type to label a page's frequently asked questions and their answers.

Google deprecated its FAQ rich result, and the feature stopped appearing in Google Search starting May 7, 2026, so the markup no longer earns that special display in Google. Clear questions and answers on the page still help the people reading it.

Source: Latest Google Search Documentation Updates

Googlebot is the generic name for the two crawlers, programs that automatically discover and scan websites, that Google Search uses: one that simulates a person on a mobile device and one that simulates a person on a desktop computer.

Googlebot finds new URLs to crawl mainly through links on pages it has already crawled, and for most sites it should not visit more than once every few seconds on average.

Source: What Is Googlebot

OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot are two of OpenAI's web crawlers: OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in ChatGPT's search features, and GPTBot crawls content that may be used in training OpenAI's generative AI foundation models.

OpenAI says each robots.txt setting is independent, so a site can allow OAI-SearchBot and stay eligible for ChatGPT search results while disallowing GPTBot to keep its content out of model training.

Source: Overview of OpenAI Crawlers

Google-Extended is a standalone product token, used in robots.txt, that lets publishers manage whether content Google crawls from their sites may be used to train future Gemini models and for grounding in Gemini Apps and Vertex AI.

Google states that Google-Extended does not affect a site's inclusion in Google Search and is not used as a ranking signal in Google Search.

Source: List of Google's common crawlers

A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which URLs on a site they can access.

It is not a way to keep a page out of Google; for that, Google points to a noindex rule or password protection.

Source: Robots.txt Introduction and Guide

An XML sitemap is a file, written in XML, where a site provides information about its pages, videos and other files so search engines like Google can crawl it more efficiently.

Google says a sitemap does not guarantee that every item in it will be crawled and indexed.

Source: What Is a Sitemap

A canonical URL is the address a site marks as the main version of a page when duplicate or very similar versions of that page exist at other addresses.

The usual method is a rel="canonical" link element in the page's head section, which Google describes as a strong signal that the named URL should become canonical.

Source: How to Specify a Canonical with rel="canonical" and Other Methods

Indexing is the stage of Google Search in which Google analyzes the text, images and video on a crawled page and stores that information in the Google index, a large database.

Google says indexing is not guaranteed and that not every page it processes will be indexed.

Source: In-depth guide to how Google Search works

People-first content is content created primarily for people rather than to manipulate search engine rankings, the standard at the center of Google's guidance on helpful content.

Google's page on the subject, Creating Helpful, Reliable, People-First Content, includes questions a site owner can use to evaluate whether their own content is helpful and reliable.

Source: Creating Helpful, Reliable, People-First Content

Doorway pages are sites or pages created to rank for specific, similar search queries that lead people to intermediate pages less useful than the final destination, a practice Google's spam policies call doorway abuse.

Google's examples include multiple pages aimed at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page. That is why each city or service-area page needs local detail of its own, not just a swapped place name.

What a service area page should cover

Source: Spam Policies for Google Web Search

E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, the qualities Google's guidance uses to describe helpful, reliable content.

Google says E-E-A-T itself is not a specific ranking factor, and that of the four, trust is most important.

Source: Creating Helpful, Reliable, People-First Content

Google Search Console is a free Google service that helps site owners monitor, maintain and troubleshoot their site's presence in Google Search results.

It can confirm that Google can find and crawl a site, help fix indexing problems and show search traffic data. Signing up is not required to appear in Google Search.

Source: About Search Console

In Google Search Console, an impression means a user has seen, or potentially seen, a link to your site in Google Search, Discover or News.

Standard impression rules also apply to links in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and an AI Overview occupies a single position in the results that all of its links share.

Source: What are impressions, position, and clicks?

AI search impressions are the times links to a site were shown to people in Google's generative AI features, such as AI Overviews and AI Mode, as counted in Search Console's Generative AI performance report.

Google says the report rolled out to all websites worldwide as of August 31, 2026, breaks impressions down by page, country, device and date, and may not appear for a site with too few generative AI impressions.

How to measure AI search results

Source: Generative AI performance report (Search)

Zero-click search is a common industry term for a search that ends without the person clicking through to any website, usually because an answer appeared on the results page itself.

AI summaries and other on-page answers can mean fewer visits even when your information is being used, which is why visibility is often tracked alongside clicks rather than through clicks alone.

An answer asset is Hudson South's term for any published piece built to answer one real buyer question directly, in the business's own voice, so the answer can be lifted and quoted on its own.

Articles, service pages, city pages, question pages, emails and social posts can all qualify. A piece that circles a topic without answering a specific question does not.

What makes a piece an answer asset

Authority Asset is the first of Hudson South's four steps: it finds the expertise a business already has that does not show up on its website and turns it into a written record.

It captures things like the process the business has refined, the thing it explains to every customer and the answer nobody wrote down. Everything else is built from it.

Why the Authority Asset comes first

Hudson Twenty-One is the second of Hudson South's four steps: an analysis of how a business communicates across 21 dimensions, such as sentence rhythm, vocabulary, how it handles objections and how it opens and closes.

The output is the Twenty-One profile, a written specification of how the business sounds, and the client keeps it.

How Hudson Twenty-One works

Market Intelligence is the third of Hudson South's four steps: research into the market a business competes in, covering what people there ask, what competitors have already answered and what nobody has covered.

Local businesses get city pages with real local detail; national brands get the same work across segments, product lines or buyer roles. The output is a researched map of the questions to answer, in priority order.

AEO Creation is the fourth of Hudson South's four steps: producing the content and structuring it so AI systems can pull from it, with clear answers near the top, specific evidence, named expertise and the technical setup that lets a machine understand what it is reading.

The output is published pages and posts, reviewed by the client and live on the client's site.

How the four steps fit together

Market exclusivity is Hudson South's practice of taking one business per trade in each geographic market, so it is not writing the same answers for a direct competitor in the same area.

Market exclusivity comes with most monthly plans; your proposal confirms it and names the trade and the area. It is not included with a project.

What one business per trade per market means

A Hudson Deed site is the name for every website Hudson South builds: a site the client owns outright, with the domain and hosting account in the client's name and the copy and structured data belonging to the client.

Builds run on Netlify, WordPress or Squarespace and follow the same four steps as the content work. Stock photos, premium fonts and paid plugins belong to their vendors and are licensed in the client's name so they carry over, and in regulated industries the licensed professional still approves content.

Hudson Deed website builds

An AI visibility report is a recurring report built from a defined set of buyer questions run across AI platforms, showing how a business appears in the answers.

Monthly plans include a visibility report on a defined question set run across AI platforms, with competitor comparison on larger plans. A sample of answers shows a pattern; it does not predict what any one person will see.

What an AI visibility report should show