Glossary

AEO is the practice of making your business the answer an AI assistant gives when someone asks who to hire — not just a link in a list.

AI Mode is a conversational version of Google Search that lets users have a back-and-forth dialogue with an AI instead of typing one query at a time.

AI Overviews are the AI-generated answer boxes that appear at the top of Google Search, summarizing several sources in plain language before any blue links.

A citation is when an AI links to your page as a source; a recommendation is when an AI tells the user to choose your business. Both are valuable, and they reward slightly different content.

Entity clarity is how confidently an AI or search engine can answer 'who is this business?' — exact name, location, services, hours, and category, agreed everywhere they look.

Extractability is how easy it is for an AI to lift a clean, accurate answer out of your page without having to guess or paraphrase awkwardly.

GEO is the practice of getting your content selected, summarized, and cited by AI tools that generate answers from many sources at once.

An LLM is the kind of AI that reads questions and writes answers — the engine inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and the AI summaries you now see on Google.

llms.txt is a small text file you put on your website that hands AI tools a curated map of your most important pages — like a sitemap, but for language models.

SEO is the practice of making your website and business listings show up — and look trustworthy — when someone searches for what you do.

ChatGPT is OpenAI's conversational AI assistant — used by hundreds of millions of people each week to ask questions, get recommendations, and (increasingly) decide which businesses to hire.

Claude is Anthropic's AI assistant — known for thoughtful, citation-aware answers and used by a growing audience of consumers and professionals for research and recommendations.

Gemini is Google's family of AI assistants — used standalone via gemini.google.com, embedded across Google products, and tightly tied to the same signals that power Google Search.

Grok is xAI's AI assistant, distributed primarily through X (formerly Twitter) and tuned to pull from recent social and web content.

Meta AI is the assistant Meta has rolled out across WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger — exposed to hundreds of millions of users but with variable buying intent.

Copilot is Microsoft's AI assistant, embedded across Windows, Bing, Edge, Microsoft 365, and the broader Microsoft ecosystem.

Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine that answers questions with a short summary plus visible citations to the web pages it pulled from.

A local citation is any mention of your business's name, address, and phone number on another website — directories, review sites, industry associations — used by search engines to confirm you're real.

E-E-A-T is Google's framework for whether a page can be trusted — built on real experience, demonstrated expertise, recognized authority, and verifiable trust signals.

Google Business Profile is the free Google listing that controls how your business appears on Google Search and Google Maps — name, hours, services, photos, and reviews.

The Local Pack is the box of three local businesses (with a map) that Google shows near the top of search results when someone searches for a nearby service.

NAP is short for Name, Address, and Phone — the three pieces of business information that have to match exactly across your website, Google Business Profile, and every directory that lists you.

Reviews are the customer ratings and written feedback that appear on your Google Business Profile, Yelp, Facebook, and industry-specific sites — one of the strongest signals search engines and AI assistants use to decide who to recommend.

Schema is invisible markup you add to your web pages that tells search engines and AI assistants — in their own format — exactly what your content is about.

A Service Area Business is a business that travels to customers — plumbers, electricians, movers, landscapers — rather than serving them at a fixed storefront.

A one-question survey added to your intake form or first phone call that asks new customers where they heard about you — the simplest and most honest form of attribution available to a local business.

Attribution is the practice of figuring out which channel or piece of marketing actually deserves credit for a phone call, form fill, or booking.

Branded searches are queries that include your business name; non-branded searches are queries that describe a need without naming you ('plumber near me').

Click-through rate is the share of people who saw your listing and actually clicked it — calculated as clicks divided by impressions.

An impression is one time your business appeared in a search result, AI answer, map, or listing — whether or not anyone clicked.