GEO Glossary
The vocabulary of ranking on generative engines. Terms explained the way you'd use them in a meeting.
This glossary explains the terms used in GEO, the practice of being found and cited by AI answer engines, in plain words. It is for marketers, SEOs and site owners who hear terms like AEO, llms.txt or citability and want a clear definition. Each entry is short enough to use in a meeting.
Read next:Generative engine optimization: the guide · Agentic navigability and citability
Optimizing to be found and cited by generative engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini — not just indexed by classic search engines.
Your site represented as nodes (pages) and edges (links plus affinity of meaning). It makes visible the real structure engines perceive.
A page that drives direct revenue (product, quote request, conversion). Its reachability inside the graph is critical.
A page with no incoming internal links: crawlers struggle to reach it and generative engines tend to ignore it.
How authority flows between a site's pages through internal links. It shapes which pages engines treat as important — and which ones get cited.
How an LLM splits a page into self-contained passages before deciding what to quote. Well-structured pages survive chunking; walls of text don't.
How easy a page is to extract and cite as a source in a generated answer. The real goal of GEO.
The number of clicks from the homepage to a page. Beyond level three, crawling thins out and citability drops.
How easily an AI agent can reach the pages of your site by following links and reading what it finds. Pages buried deep or with no links in cannot be used in answers.
Read moreHow easy it is for an AI agent to pull a clear passage from your page and name your site as the source. Short, self-contained, answer-shaped passages score best.
Read moreGraphoRank's 0–100 score for agentic navigability and citability: how well AI agents can reach, read and cite a site. Every site is measured the same way on every scan.
Shaping content so a search or AI engine can give it as the direct answer to a question. It overlaps with GEO and relies on clear questions, short answers and structured data.
Read moreA plain text file at the root of your site that lists your most useful pages for AI systems. It is a proposal that some tools read; it does not guarantee citations.
Google's AI-written summaries at the top of some search results, with links to sources. Being cited there is one of the goals of GEO.
Read moreQuick answers
GEO, or generative engine optimization, is the work of making your content easy for AI answer engines to find, understand and cite. It adds to SEO and does not replace it.
SEO aims to rank pages in search results. AEO aims to have your content chosen as the direct answer to a question. GEO aims to have it cited inside answers written by generative AI.
It is how easily an AI agent can reach the pages of your site by following links and reading what it finds. A page no agent can reach cannot be cited.
It is how easy a page is to extract and cite as a source in a generated answer.
No. llms.txt is a proposed file that points AI systems to your most useful pages. It can help them find your content, but no engine promises to cite you because of it.
GraphoRank gives every site a GraphRank score from 0 to 100 for agentic navigability and citability, and shows the fixes that move it.