Glossary
The AI search glossary.
Plain definitions for the vocabulary that has grown up around AI search — GEO, AEO, llms.txt, citations, AI visibility and the structured data underneath all of it. Written for people running online stores, not for people selling courses about it.
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AI search has generated more terminology than it has generated proven tactics, and a lot of it is the same idea wearing three different names.
These definitions are here to make the vocabulary usable: what each term actually means, where the boundaries between them genuinely fall, and what — if anything — it changes about running an ecommerce site. Where a term is more marketing than mechanism, the entry says so.
Definitions
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
GEOGenerative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of structuring and publishing content so that generative AI systems — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, Claude — retrieve it, quote it accurately, and cite the source. Where classic SEO competes for a position in a list of ten blue links, GEO competes to be the passage an AI model lifts into its answer. The unit of success is not a ranking but an inclusion: was your sentence used, and was your brand named alongside it.
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AI Visibility
AI search visibilityAI visibility is the extent to which a brand, product or page appears in answers generated by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI Overviews. It combines three things: how often you are mentioned across a defined set of queries, whether you are cited with a link, and how favourably you are characterised when you appear. Unlike search rankings, it is not reported anywhere — it exists only if you measure it.
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Where this fits into ecommerce SEO
None of these terms describe a replacement for search engine optimisation. Generative answers are built from retrieved pages, and retrieval runs on the same index classic search uses, so a store that is slow, thinly linked or lacking topical authority will not be retrieved and therefore cannot be cited. The vocabulary here describes a layer of structural discipline on top of SEO that works, not an alternative to it.
If you are working out what to do rather than what to call it, our Shopify SEO services guide covers the programme, and our comparison of the best AI SEO tools for ecommerce brands covers the tooling.
A reasonable sequencing for a store: get structured data clean, build the answer layer beside your product pages, then start measuring citation share. Doing the third before the first two produces a dashboard with nothing in it.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between GEO, AEO and SEO?
SEO optimises for a position in a list of search results. AEO optimises to be the single direct answer a system returns when there is no list, such as a featured snippet or a voice result. GEO optimises to be a source that a generative model retrieves, quotes and cites while composing a new answer. They share almost all of their technical foundations — a page that cannot be indexed cannot be retrieved by any of them — but they differ in how content should be structured and in how success is measured.
Do these terms describe genuinely new work, or rebranded SEO?
Mostly the second, with a real new component. The crawlability, site speed, internal linking and topical authority that AI retrieval depends on are exactly the SEO fundamentals that already existed. What is genuinely new is the emphasis on extractability — writing self-contained, answer-first passages that survive being lifted out of the page — and the measurement problem, because no assistant reports how often it cited you.
Which of these should an ecommerce store work on first?
Structured data, because it is the cheapest to fix and everything else depends on machines parsing your catalogue correctly. After that, build the answer layer: pages that directly address the questions customers ask before buying, each opening with a complete answer rather than a preamble. Citation tracking comes last, once there is something worth tracking.
