Glossary
Every AI search term, in one sentence.
The words that come up when people talk about being found by Google and AI, and the words behind how Omnishown works. No jargon without a definition.
Start here: SEO, AEO and GEO
Three names for overlapping jobs. You need all three, and they reward the same habit: say clearly what you are.
SEO
Search Engine Optimisation
- Aims to
- Rank in the list of links
- Shows up in
- Google and other search results
- Scope
- Pages, links and technical health
AEO
Answer Engine Optimisation
- Aims to
- Be the answer that gets extracted
- Shows up in
- Featured answers, AI Overviews, assistants
- Scope
- Structure, questions and concise answers
GEO
Generative Engine Optimisation
- Aims to
- Be named and recommended
- Shows up in
- ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and similar
- Scope
- Clear facts, trust signals and mentions
Measuring AI visibility
How you tell whether AI names you.
- Buyer question
- A question a customer might put to an AI engine before buying, such as “best dental clinic near Kondapur”.
- Sampling
- Asking the same question more than once, because AI answers vary from run to run and one answer is only an anecdote.
- AI Overview
- The AI-written summary Google shows above some search results, with links to the pages it drew on.
- Zero-click search
- A search where the person gets what they need on the results page and never visits a website.
Getting named and cited
What makes a page easy for AI to use.
- Citation
- A link or source an AI answer shows to back up what it says.
- Entity
- A distinct thing, such as a business or a person, that search and AI systems can recognise and connect facts to.
- Structured data
- Labels added to a page's code that describe facts like your business type, hours or FAQs in a form machines read directly.
- Schema.org
- The shared vocabulary of types and properties used to write structured data.
- JSON-LD
- A tidy way to write structured data as a block of code in a page, without changing what visitors see.
- FAQ markup
- Structured data that marks a set of questions and answers so machines can tell which is which.
- Hallucination
- A confident, fluent AI claim that is not supported by facts or sources.
- Grounding
- Tying an AI answer to real documents so each claim can be traced to a source.
Letting crawlers in
How machines find and read your pages.
- Crawler
- A program that reads web pages on behalf of a search engine or an AI product.
- AI crawler
- A crawler operated by an AI company to gather pages for training or for answering questions.
- robots.txt
- A file at the root of a site that tells each crawler which paths it may request. Following it is voluntary for crawlers, though reputable ones do.
- llms.txt
- A proposed plain-text file at the root of a site that gives language models a short summary and the key links. Not an official standard.
- Sitemap
- A file listing the pages you want search engines to know about.
- Canonical tag
- A tag that tells search engines which version of a page is the main one when several are alike.
Working with code
The words behind how Omnishown works.
- Repository
- The folder, tracked by Git, that holds a website's code and its history.
- Push
- Sending new changes to a repository.
- Pull request
- A proposed change to code, shown line by line, that someone reviews before it is merged.
- Diff
- The view of exactly which lines were removed and added in a change.
- Status check
- An automatic result, such as passed or failed, shown on a change in GitHub.
- Revert
- Undoing a merged change by adding a new change that reverses it.
- Branch protection
- GitHub rules, such as required checks and reviews, that a change must meet before it can be merged.
Want the bigger picture? Read the AI visibility guide.
Be one of the first sites on Omnishown.
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- No card, no commitment
- Every fix arrives as a pull request you approve
- Planned pricing from ₹2,999 per site per month