The GEO glossary

A–C

AI Overview

Google's AI-generated answer box that appears above traditional results, citing a handful of source sites. One of the two engines GeoTest measures citation rates against.

Authority Signals

Evidence of who is behind a site: author bylines, About/Team pages, founding date, contact info. Worth 17 points on the GEO rubric.

Citation

A generative engine naming or linking your site as a source inside its answer. The unit of currency in GEO — rankings don't transfer, citations do.

Citation Rate

The percentage of category-relevant prompts that surface a site as a cited source. GeoTest measures it with a live prompt panel run against real engines.

Citation Worthiness

How liftable your content is: factual density, quotable definitions, comparison tables, freshness. Worth 20 points on the rubric.

Cornerstone Page

A comprehensive 1,500+ word page covering your core topic in depth. Generative engines disproportionately cite them over thin posts.

Content Quality

Depth, heading hierarchy, and originality of your content. The heaviest rubric category at 25 points.

Crawler Accessibility

Whether AI crawlers can reach and read your pages: viewport meta, canonical tags, no noindex, server-rendered text. 8 rubric points.

D–F

Definition Clarity

Clean "X is Y" statements an engine can quote verbatim. If your definition takes three sentences, an engine will find someone whose takes one.

Domain Verification

Proving you control a domain via a meta tag, which claims your benchmark entry and shows a ✓ Verified badge.

Factual Density

The concentration of verifiable claims — statistics, dates, dollar amounts — per unit of text. Numbers beat adjectives.

FAQPage Schema

JSON-LD markup declaring a page's questions and answers. The fastest GEO win we measure.

Freshness

Visible, recent update signals — a "Last updated" date with real changes behind it. A tiebreaker when engines choose between similar sources.

Site Analysis

GeoTest's multi-page scan: crawls your site from the homepage, follows internal links, and analyzes up to 200 pages. Larger sites are sampled.

G–L

Generative Engine

An AI system that composes answers rather than listing links: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overview, Claude, Gemini.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)

The practice of structuring a website so generative AI engines can read, trust, and cite its content. GEO is to AI answers what SEO is to blue links.

GEO Score

GeoTest's 0–100 rating of AI visibility, built from six weighted categories.

JSON-LD

The structured-data format engines parse natively — a script block describing your page in machine-readable terms. Schema's preferred syntax.

LLM (Large Language Model)

The model class behind generative engines. LLMs don't index your site like Google — they either learned it, retrieve it, or ignore it.

M–R

Organization Schema

JSON-LD identifying your company: name, logo, founding date, contacts. The "who's talking" block — engines check it before quoting you.

Prompt Panel

The set of category-relevant prompts GeoTest runs against live engines to measure a site's real citation rate.

Quick Scan

The free scan of a single URL: GEO Score, category breakdown, top 3 issues, and a Start Here fix list.

Rewrite Factory

GeoTest's AI rewrites of underperforming pages, optimized for citation worthiness — copy/paste ready.

Rubric (GEO v3.0)

The published 100-point scoring standard: Content 25, Citation 20, Schema 18, Authority 17, FAQ 12, Crawl 8. Same rubric for every site.

S–Z

Schema Markup

Structured data describing your pages to machines. GeoTest audits six types: Organization, WebSite, Product, Article, Breadcrumb, FAQPage.

sonar-pro

The Perplexity model GeoTest uses for live citation testing — the closest thing to asking the engine, "would you cite this site?"

Server-Rendered Text

Content present in the HTML before JavaScript runs. Many AI crawlers don't execute JS — if your text isn't server-rendered, it may not exist to them.

Verified Badge

The ✓ mark on benchmark entries whose owners proved domain control. Verified entries display publicly with their score.