AI Marketing Glossary
The vocabulary of marketing is changing as AI engines and agents reshape how brands get discovered and chosen. These are the terms that matter most in the AI-mediated web — each defined plainly and linked to a full guide. For the big picture, start with The Agent-Ready Brand.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
The practice of structuring content and data so AI engines — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and AI Overviews — cite and recommend your brand inside their answers. Read the complete GEO guide.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Structuring content and schema so answer engines and AI assistants extract and attribute your brand’s answer to a specific question. Read the AEO guide.
Agentic Commerce
The emerging model where AI agents discover, compare, check out, and pay for products on a person’s behalf within guardrails the person sets. Read the agentic commerce guide.
Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)
An open standard, co-developed by Google with major retailers and platforms, defining how AI agents handle product discovery, inventory validation, checkout, and post-purchase tracking.
Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)
A protocol that adds cryptographic, tokenized guardrails so an AI agent can pay only within the brands, products, and spending limits a user has authorized.
llms.txt
A simple file placed at a site’s root (like robots.txt) that points AI systems to the most important, authoritative content in a clean, readable format. Read about llms.txt and the brand knowledge file.
Brand Knowledge File
A structured, verified record of a brand’s truth — products, pricing, claims, policies, and FAQs — written for machines to consume as the canonical, authoritative source. Build one with the Brand Knowledge File Generator.
Share of Model
The AI-era successor to share of voice: how often, and how favorably, AI engines mention and recommend your brand relative to competitors. Read the share of model guide.
AI Overviews
Google’s AI-generated summaries at the top of the results page that synthesize an answer and cite the sources they draw from. Read how to optimize for AI Overviews.
Prompt Group
A core question plus a handful of natural variations, tracked across AI engines over time — the right unit for measuring AI visibility, since answers vary by phrasing. See how to get cited in AI assistants.
AI Readiness
How prepared a brand is to be found, understood, trusted, and chosen by AI answer engines and autonomous agents — across discovery, understanding, trust, and transactability. Measure yours in the AI Readiness Hub.
GEO vs SEO
SEO optimizes to rank in search results; GEO optimizes to be cited in AI answers. They share a foundation but win differently — and brands now need both. Read GEO vs SEO.
Put these into practice. Explore the AI Readiness Hub, run the AI Visibility Checker, or start free.