LIVING DOCUMENT — UPDATED QUARTERLY
last updated: 25/04/2026
Concepts A–Z
- Answer shaping: The technique whereby content not only provides an answer, but also defines the criteria and decision framework on which the answer is based. Whoever sets the criteria indirectly steers the conclusion.
- Citation rate: The percentage of AI answers, measured across a defined prompt set, in which your brand or content is explicitly mentioned as a source.
- Defensive GEO: The set of strategies aimed at monitoring and correcting incorrect or unwanted AI representations of a brand. See Cluster 9.
- E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. Google’s quality framework — relevant in GEO as a set of signals AI systems use to judge source reliability.
- Entity: A named concept — person, organisation, product, location or notion — that is uniquely identifiable. AI systems work strongly on an entity basis.
- Entity salience: How prominently and consistently an entity appears in content. High salience increases citation likelihood.
- Fragility Index: The degree to which your position in AI answers is stable or vulnerable to small prompt variations. High Fragility means your visibility depends on chance phrasings.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation): The discipline focused on maximising brand visibility in AI-generated answers — through on-site and off-site strategies.
- Grounding: Anchoring AI output to specific retrieved documents or facts, reducing hallucination.
- Hallucination: An AI system generating factually incorrect information with seemingly high confidence. The reason factual, well-structured content performs better.
- Inclusion threshold: The implicit threshold a brand must cross to be part of the ‘default shortlist’ an AI model has learned. See Cluster 8.
- LLM (Large Language Model): A large language model trained on extensive text corpora. The engine behind generative AI systems.
- Mental availability in AI: The degree to which a brand is present in the ‘mental model’ of an AI system — independent of active retrieval. The AI equivalent of brand awareness.
- Narrative Share: The amount of answer space dedicated to your brand — not just whether you are mentioned, but how extensively and how centrally. See sub-page 4.5.
- Off-site GEO: GEO optimisation through external platforms: Wikipedia, reviews, sector publications, comparison sites. See sub-page 3.5.
- Prompt intent: The underlying goal behind a user query: informational, navigational, transactional or comparative.
- RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation): A technique where an AI retrieves live documents before generating an answer.
- Schema.org: Standardised vocabulary for structured data on web pages. Makes content machine-readable for AI systems.
- Share of Voice (SoV) in AI: The share of AI answers in which your brand is mentioned versus competitors, across a benchmark prompt set.
- Training data: The text corpora on which an LLM is trained, with a fixed cut-off date.
- Volatility Score: The degree to which the position in AI answers varies on repeated measurements of identical prompts. High Volatility indicates unstable visibility.
- YMYL (Your Money Your Life): Category of content with direct impact on financial wellbeing or safety. AI systems apply stricter reliability criteria here.
- Zero-click: A situation where a user receives their answer without clicking through. AI answers are zero-click by definition.
Related in the hub
→ Missing a term? The glossary is updated quarterly based on field developments.