Controlled vocabulary

Topics

A semantic map of AI visibility — broader than whichever acronym the industry is using this year.

AI Citations

Attribution, linking, and source selection in AI-generated answers.

AI Crawler Governance

Policies and controls governing AI crawler access and declared purpose.

AI Discoverability

Whether AI systems can find and retrieve information from a source.

AI Shopping & Commerce Discovery

Product discovery, comparison, recommendation, and agentic commerce through AI.

AI Visibility

Visibility of entities, brands, pages, products, or information in AI-mediated discovery.

AI Visibility Measurement

Methods and metrics for measuring mentions, citations, share of voice, and discoverability.

Agentic Discovery

AI systems that research, select, and act on information across multiple steps.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)

Optimization for systems that return direct answers rather than only ranked links.

Bing / Microsoft Copilot Search

Microsoft's LLM-powered search and answer experiences.

ChatGPT Search

Web search and source-linked answers inside ChatGPT.

Claude Web Search

Anthropic's web-search and citation capabilities.

Entity Understanding

How systems resolve real-world entities and their relationships.

Featured Snippets

Extracted answer blocks surfaced directly in search results.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

Optimization for visibility, citation, or inclusion in generative search and answer engines.

Google AI Mode

Google's end-to-end conversational AI Search experience.

Google AI Overviews

Google Search's generated overview experience.

Large Language Model Optimization (LLMO)

Optimization aimed at how LLM-based systems understand, retrieve, cite, or recommend entities and content.

Perplexity

Perplexity's answer-engine and AI search ecosystem.

Query Fan-Out

Decomposing a user question into multiple related searches or subqueries.

Retrieval

Finding candidate information or documents for an AI response.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

Generation grounded in retrieved external information.

Source Selection

How AI systems choose which retrieved sources support or appear in an answer.

Structured Data

Machine-readable markup and vocabularies describing entities and content.

Voice & Conversational Assistants

Spoken and conversational answer interfaces.

llms.txt

A proposed convention for providing concise LLM-oriented site information.