GEO glossary

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)

All the actions that make a business visible, accurately described and recommended in the answers of AI assistants (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews).

AI assistant (generative engine)

A tool that answers a question with written text, sometimes citing sources: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Claude, Le Chat…

AI Overviews

A written answer shown by Google at the top of some search results, with links to the pages it used.

Mention (being recommended)

The business is named in the answer. Recoia measures the mention rate: the share of answers that name it.

Citation (with a link)

The answer contains a link to the business’s website. This is what can bring visits.

Share of voice

A business’s share of mentions among all the businesses named in the answers to a set of questions.

Question (prompt)

The sentence put to the assistant, worded the way a customer would: “which plumber can I call in Lille on a Sunday?”.

Intent

What the person is looking for: discovering options, comparing, deciding, or finding out about a specific brand.

Opportunity

In Recoia: a topic (a service in an area) where there is demand and where the business is rarely recommended by AI assistants.

Confidence interval

The range in which the true rate very probably lies. Recoia shows 95% intervals (Wilson method), because an AI answer varies from one time to the next.

Run

One execution of a question on an assistant. Recoia does several runs per question and per assistant to get a reliable rate.

Source

A page the assistant consulted or cited to write its answer: business website, directory, review site, media, forum.

Structured data (JSON-LD)

A coded description of a page (business, service, FAQ) using the schema.org vocabulary. It must match what is visible on the page.

robots.txt

A file at the root of a website that tells crawlers what they may explore. Blocking OAI-SearchBot prevents a site from appearing in ChatGPT search answers, according to OpenAI.

OAI-SearchBot

OpenAI’s crawler that finds and shows websites in ChatGPT search answers. Different from GPTBot, which is used to train the models.

PerplexityBot

Perplexity’s crawler that surfaces and links websites in its results. Perplexity recommends allowing it in order to appear.

llms.txt

A proposed text file that summarises a website for language models. Google states that no such file is needed for its AI Overviews.

utm_source

A parameter added to a link to show where a visit comes from. ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to its search links.

Brand truth

In Recoia: comparing AI assistants’ answers with the business’s validated identity sheet (phone, address, opening hours, prices) to spot errors.

Crash test

In Recoia: an estimate of the effect of a new version of a page before it is published, based on the same sources as the AI assistants.

Pooling

In Recoia: the same question asked in the same week on the same market is run only once for all customers, which reduces costs.

To go further: our guides and our measurement methodology.