AI Search Glossary: GEO, AEO, llms.txt & Agent-Readiness Terms

Plain-language definitions for every term used across the DigiJaws docs — from GEO and AEO to llms.txt and agent-readiness. Each entry is short enough to quote and links back to the guides that use it.

AI search readiness

How well a website can be found, understood, trusted, and acted on by AI search engines and autonomous agents. The umbrella over GEO, AEO, and agent-readiness.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)

Optimizing a site to be cited as a source inside AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. The goal is to be quoted and linked, not just ranked.

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)

Optimizing content to be selected as the direct answer in answer engines — featured snippets, voice results, and AI Overviews — using question headings, concise lead answers, and FAQ or HowTo schema.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Optimizing a site to rank in traditional search results so a human clicks through. Focuses on rankings and clicks rather than AI citation.

Agent-readiness

How easily an autonomous AI agent can find, trust, and transact with a site, via signals like llms.txt, open AI-crawler access, structured offers, and callable endpoints.

Answer engine

A system that returns a single synthesized answer instead of a list of links — for example Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, or a voice assistant.

Generative engine

An AI tool that generates original answers from many sources, such as ChatGPT or Gemini. GEO targets being cited inside these answers.

llms.txt

A plain-text file at a site root that tells large language models what the site is and points to its most important content, similar in spirit to robots.txt but for meaning rather than crawling rules.

robots.txt

A file that tells crawlers which parts of a site they may access. For AI-readiness, it determines whether AI crawlers like GPTBot and ClaudeBot are allowed or blocked.

AI crawler

A bot that fetches web pages to train or ground AI models, such as GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended. Blocking them removes you from AI search.

Structured data (JSON-LD)

Machine-readable labels added to a page, usually as JSON-LD, that tell engines what the content is — an organization, an FAQ, a product, a how-to — so models do not have to guess.

Organization schema

Structured data that describes a brand identity: legal name, logo, and official links. It helps AI engines trust and correctly attribute a source.

FAQ schema

Structured data that marks up questions and their answers so answer engines can extract and display them directly.

Open Graph

Meta tags that define how a page appears when shared or cited — its title, description, and preview image. Clean Open Graph improves how links surface in AI and social results.

Canonical tag

A tag that names the preferred version of a page so engines index one URL instead of splitting signals across duplicates.

Sitemap (sitemap.xml)

A machine-readable index of a site URLs that helps crawlers and agents discover every page.

Meta description

A short page summary that engines can lift as a snippet. A clear one improves how a page is represented in results.

AI Overviews

Google AI-generated answers that appear above traditional search results, drawing from multiple sources. Being cited here is a core AEO goal.

AI-readiness score

A 0-to-100 measure, with a letter grade, of how ready a page is for AI engines and agents, built from eleven weighted DigiJaws signals across Discovery, Understanding, and Trust.

Learn more

See what AI search readiness is, how the score works, and how DigiJaws works. To measure your own site against these terms, run the free SEO Agent.