AI Overviews. Google’s synthesized answers at the top of search results, built on its core ranking and quality systems.
Answer engine. Any system that responds to a question with a synthesized answer naming sources or companies, rather than a list of links.
Citation. An engine using, and often linking, a specific page as a source for its answer. The unit of victory in this book.
Crawler / bot. Software an engine sends to fetch web pages. Each platform’s crawler has a name your robots.txt can allow or block (GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, Bingbot, CCBot).
Delta. The change between two dated readings of the same prompt set. The only measurement this book trusts.
E-E-A-T. Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness: the quality framework behind Google’s guidelines, read in this book as a checklist of unforgeable signals.
Entity. A thing machines can identify unambiguously: a company, person, or product. Entity clarity is being one consistent thing everywhere.
Extraction test. Pulled out alone, does the passage still say something true, complete, and attributable?
GEO. Generative engine optimization: the practice of earning presence in AI-generated answers. Also called AI SEO, AEO (answer engine optimization), and LLMO. All one discipline: access, structure, evidence, entity, rhythm.
Knowledge Graph. Google’s structured map of entities and relationships, feeding Gemini and the entity lane of the audit.
llms.txt. A proposed convention: a machine-readable file at your domain root mapping your key pages for AI systems. Cheap, modest, unevenly supported.
Point-in-time. The status of every AI answer ever captured. Answers move between days, sessions, and accounts; screenshots are dated for a reason.
Prompt set. Your standing list of 10 to 20 buying questions, run identically each month.
Query fan-out. Google’s AI generating related queries under the hood and synthesizing across them; the reason topical coverage beats keyword sniping.
Schema / structured data. JSON-LD in your pages stating facts in a standard vocabulary machines parse directly.
Zero-click search. A query answered on the results surface itself, with no visit to any website.