The GEO glossary

A–C

AI Overview

Google's AI-generated answer box that appears above traditional results, citing a handful of source sites. GeoTest scores whether a page is ready to be cited there; its live citation tests run on Perplexity and Gemini.

Answer Structure

Whether an engine can lift a complete answer from a section: sections that open with the answer, a clean heading hierarchy, a visible Q&A block, FAQPage schema backed by visible text and self-contained passages. 22 rubric points.

Authority and Trust

Evidence of who is behind a page and who vouches for it: social proof, author bylines on articles, contact methods, privacy and terms links and contextual internal links. 17 rubric points.

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: sourced facts and fact density per 1,000 words, coverage of the facts cited pages agree on, attributed quotations, external citations, comparison tables and quotable definitions. The heaviest rubric category at 34 points.

Coverage

The share of the expected evidence a scan actually evaluated, shown beside every score. A page under 75% coverage shows "Insufficient coverage" instead of a grade.

Crawler Registry

The versioned list GeoTest uses to class each AI user agent as search-indexing, user-triggered or training. Only the five search-indexing crawlers count toward the robots.txt score.

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.

Extractability

Whether crawlers can reach and read a page: no noindex, the text present in the initial HTML, a canonical tag and a viewport meta tag. 8 rubric points.

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. GeoTest credits it, 2 points, only when at least half its questions are visible on the page; markup with no visible Q&A scores 0.

Freshness

Visible, recent update signals — a "Last updated" date with real changes behind it, matching dateModified in schema. 7 rubric points on articles, docs and product pages.

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. The full rubric is published.

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 15-second scan of a single URL: GEO Score, category breakdown and the issues it finds. No account needed to scan; a free account opens the full list of issues, and tailored fixes are on paid plans.

Rewrite Factory

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

Rubric (GEO v6.0)

The published 100-point scoring standard in two layers. Page layer: Citation Worthiness 34, Answer Structure 22, Authority and Trust 17, Structured Data 12, Freshness 7, Extractability 8. Site layer: topical clusters, About or Team page, entity completeness, robots.txt, breadth, Q&A surface, sitemap, site-wide fact density, schema consistency, internal link health, contact and legal pages; llms.txt is reported but not scored. Site score = 70% pages + 30% site. Length scores nothing; under 150 body words caps an article or other content page at 40.

S–Z

Schema Markup

Structured data describing your pages to machines. GeoTest checks that the main schema type fits the page, that every JSON-LD block parses, and that names, ratings, prices and dates agree with the visible text.

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.

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.

sonar-pro

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

Topical Cluster

Three or more substantive pages that share terms in their titles, headings or URLs and link to each other from the body copy. Up to 12 points in the site layer: depth on a topic, not one long page.

Verified Badge

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

AI search in figures

These AI search figures show how fast answers are replacing clicks, and each one is dated and sourced. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is a method for structuring a website so AI answer engines can read, trust and cite it. A citation is defined as a link to your page inside an AI answer, and the GEO Score refers to a 0 to 100 rating of how ready a page is to earn one. These published figures show why it matters; the reasoning behind every weight is in the methodology.

How much do AI summaries reduce clicks?

AI summaries cut clicks by about half: Pew Research Center found searchers clicked a result 8% of the time when an AI summary appeared, versus 15% without one, a 47% drop (July 2025).

How common are zero-click searches in 2025?

Zero-click searches rose from 56% to 69% between May 2024 and May 2025, and 83% of searches end without a click when AI Overviews show, according to Similarweb (2025).

What share of websites are ready for AI search?

Very few websites are ready: only 2% of the 537 sites in the GeoTest benchmark scored 80 or more in September 2026, and the median score was 47. Those scores came from the rubrics in use before GEO v6.0.

How much search traffic are publishers losing?

Publishers are losing about a third of their Google referrals: across 2,500+ publisher websites, Google search referral traffic was down 33% globally and 38% in the US year over year as of early 2026 (Chartbeat).

How many buyers research with AI chatbots in 2026?

71% of B2B software buyers rely on AI chatbots for software research (G2, 2026), which is why being cited matters as much as ranking. See what GEO is.

Frequently asked questions

These are short, complete answers to the questions people ask about this page, each one written to stand on its own.

What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?

Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of structuring a website so AI answer engines can read, trust and cite it inside their answers. The full explanation is on What is GEO, and the term comes from the GEO research paper.

What is a GEO Score?

A GEO Score is a 0 to 100 rating of how ready a page or site is to be cited by AI answer engines, built from six published categories. Every check is on the GEO Score page.

What is FAQPage schema?

FAQPage schema is JSON-LD markup that declares a page's questions and answers so machines can read them without guessing. GeoTest credits it only when the same questions are visible on the page; see the FAQPage schema guide.

What is llms.txt?

llms.txt is a plain-text file at a site's root that summarises what the business does and links its key pages for AI engines. It is an emerging convention described at llmstxt.org.

What is fact density?

Fact density is the number of concrete, checkable facts per 1,000 words. In GEO v6.0 a page with 12.5 or more facts per 1,000 words earns full marks for it, as explained in the methodology.

Sources behind the GeoTest rubric

The GeoTest rubric draws on published research and on the specifications AI crawlers read: GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (Aggarwal et al., arXiv 2311.09735) · Google Search Central: introduction to structured data · Schema.org FAQPage · The llms.txt proposal · Sitemaps.org protocol · OpenAI crawler documentation.

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