AEO and AI search glossary
The exact definitions used across Varazm reports, methodology and product interface.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of making a website easy for AI answer engines to read, understand, quote and cite.
Full definitionGenerative Engine Optimization (GEO)
Generative Engine Optimization is a near-synonym of AEO that emphasises generative assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot rather than answer boxes in search.
Full definitionAEO Readiness
AEO Readiness is an estimated score describing how well a page is prepared to be understood and quoted by answer engines.
Full definitionAI Visibility
AI Visibility is a measured indicator of how often a brand appears in real answers produced by AI engines for a tracked set of prompts.
Full definitionAI Citation
An AI citation is a link or source reference that an answer engine attaches to its answer, pointing at a specific URL.
Full definitionBrand Mention
A brand mention is an occurrence of a brand name or one of its recognised aliases in the text of an AI answer, with or without a link.
Full definitionShare of Voice
Share of Voice is the proportion of tracked AI answers that mention your brand, compared with the answers that mention your competitors.
Full definitionCitation Share
Citation Share is the percentage of source links in tracked answers that point at your domain rather than another domain.
Full definitionPrompt Tracking
Prompt tracking is the scheduled, repeated execution of a fixed set of questions against AI engines so their answers can be compared over time.
Full definitionResponse Variability
Response variability is the degree to which an AI engine returns different answers to the same prompt on different runs.
Full definitionConfidence Score
A confidence score states how reliable a visibility figure is, based on how many repeated samples it was calculated from and how much they varied.
Full definitionSentiment
Sentiment is the tone an AI answer takes towards a brand — positive, neutral, negative or mixed — judged from the sentence containing the mention.
Full definitionEntity
An entity is a real-world thing — a company, product, person or place — that engines try to identify unambiguously behind the words on a page.
Full definitionStructured Data
Structured data is machine-readable markup, usually JSON-LD, that states explicitly what a page is about.
Full definitionAI Crawler
An AI crawler is a bot operated by an AI company to fetch web pages for training, indexing or live answer retrieval.
Full definition
Frequently asked questions
- What is Answer Engine Optimization?
- Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of preparing a website so AI answer engines can read, understand, quote and cite it. It combines technical access, semantic clarity and directly answerable content.
- How is AEO different from SEO?
- SEO optimises for a position in a list of results; AEO optimises for inclusion inside a generated answer. Most technical SEO work still helps, but AEO adds entity clarity, factual attribution and AI crawler permissions.
- What is AI Visibility?
- AI Visibility is how often your brand actually appears in answers produced by AI engines for a tracked set of prompts. It is measured from stored responses, not estimated from your page.
- How does Varazm calculate readiness?
- Readiness is computed from the page itself: 25 weighted factors grouped into technical, structural, semantic and content categories. The same page always produces the same score until the page changes.
- Why do AI responses change between runs?
- Generative models sample from a probability distribution, so the same prompt can produce different brands and sources each time. This is why a single run is never treated as a result — repeated runs are.
- Does Varazm use estimated or live data?
- Both, clearly separated. Readiness scores are estimated from your pages; visibility, citations, share of voice and sentiment come from live answers stored at run time. The interface never presents one as the other.