GEO and AI search glossary

Key takeaways

• Citation share is the closest GEO equivalent to a ranking.
• Extractability describes whether a passage can be lifted verbatim.
• Grounding is why some engines cite sources and others do not.

Terms

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

The practice of structuring content, data and entity signals so generative AI engines can read, trust and cite a company inside the answers they generate.

Answer engine

A system that returns a synthesised answer rather than a list of links — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, DeepSeek and Google's AI answers.

Citation share

The percentage of tracked answers, for a fixed prompt set, in which a given company is named. The nearest GEO equivalent of a keyword ranking.

Answer position

Where a company appears within a generated answer. Being named first carries materially more weight than being named last.

Prompt set

The fixed list of buyer questions tracked over time. Stability of the set is what makes trends comparable week to week.

Extractability

Whether a passage states a complete, self-contained fact that a model can quote without reformulation. Values with units and conditions are extractable; adjectives are not.

Entity clarity

How unambiguously a page identifies the organisation, product or standard it describes, and how consistently that identity matches other sources.

Grounding

Tying a generated statement to a retrieved source. Grounded answers cite; ungrounded answers assert from model memory.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)

The pattern where an engine retrieves documents first and writes the answer from them. It is the mechanism that makes citations possible.

AI Overviews

Google's generated summary shown above traditional results, drawing on indexed pages and reducing clicks to the sources beneath it.

Structured data (JSON-LD)

Machine-readable statements of fact embedded in a page — Organization, Product, TechArticle, FAQPage, Dataset, BreadcrumbList — that remove ambiguity for both search and answer engines.

Corroboration

Independent sources repeating a claim. It raises a model's confidence and is the strongest durable driver of being named.

Source authority

The standing of the documents an engine cited to justify an answer. Knowing them tells you which publications to earn a presence on.

Competitor segmentation

Classifying discovered competitors by company type — producer, compounder, additive supplier, OEM, distributor, trader, EPC contractor — so gap analysis compares like with like.

GEO score

EGNITE's 0–100 page score across structured data, entity clarity, citation signals, content authority and crawlability, with evidence behind every deduction.

Fix queue

The ordered list of page-level corrections produced by a scan, sorted by expected impact per unit of effort.

Expert verification

Human review of an AI-generated rewrite by an EGNITE specialist, returned corrected within 48 hours so technical and regulatory accuracy is preserved.

Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC)

Encryption designed to withstand quantum attack, standardised by NIST as FIPS 203, 204 and 205. Relevant to industrial firms whose encrypted data is being harvested now to decrypt later.

Frequently asked questions

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