Kapiway Glossary · updated August 13, 2026

The vocabulary of AI search, plainly explained.

AEO, GEO, LLM SEO, answer engines: the terms are new, overlapping and often used loosely. These are the working definitions we use at Kapiway, written to be quoted. Each one stands alone, so start anywhere.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)

Answer engine optimization is the practice of making your website easy for AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews to read, understand and cite, so that when a buyer asks a question, the answer names your brand. It extends SEO: instead of only ranking a link on a results page, you optimize to be quoted inside the answer itself.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

Generative engine optimization is a near synonym of AEO: optimizing content so generative AI systems include and cite it when composing answers. The term comes from a 2023 academic paper and is used interchangeably with AEO in practice; both describe earning visibility inside AI generated answers rather than on classic results pages.

LLM SEO

LLM SEO is optimizing a website for large language models, the systems behind ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. In practice it means allowing the right crawlers in robots.txt, publishing an llms.txt file, using structured data, and writing self-contained factual sentences that a model can quote accurately.

Answer engine

An answer engine is a system that responds to a question with a composed answer instead of a list of links. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Claude all work this way: they retrieve sources, synthesize them, and often name or link only a handful of brands. Being one of those named sources is the new position one.

llms.txt

llms.txt is a plain text file at yourdomain.com/llms.txt that tells AI systems what your site is about and which pages matter, in a format language models parse easily. In Kapiway's August 2026 study of 50 top SaaS marketing sites, 62% already published one, a sign the leaders treat AI readability as standard practice.

Training crawlers vs answer agents

Training crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot and CCBot collect web content to train future AI models. Answer agents like ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot fetch pages in real time to answer a specific user's question. They are different bots with different jobs, and robots.txt can welcome one while blocking the other, which is exactly how Figma's widely discussed policy works.

AI citation

An AI citation is when an AI answer names or links your brand as a source. Citations are the measurable outcome of AEO: they can be tracked by asking engines the questions your buyers ask and recording whether your brand appears in the answers, which is how Kapiway's citation tracking works, keeping the actual answers as proof.

Structured data (schema markup)

Structured data is machine readable markup, usually JSON-LD using schema.org vocabulary, that states what a page contains: who the organization is, what a product costs, what question a section answers. It helps search and answer engines understand content instead of guessing. It was the weakest area in Kapiway's 50 site study: 58% of top SaaS sites scored poorly on it.

AI readiness

AI readiness is how well a website can be crawled, understood and cited by AI systems. It spans crawler access in robots.txt, an llms.txt file, structured data, answer shaped content, and technical health. It can be measured: Kapiway's free scan grades a site on these factors in about two minutes.

AI visibility

AI visibility is how often and how prominently AI answers mention your brand across the questions that matter to your buyers. Unlike a keyword ranking, it is measured by probing engines with real questions and recording the answers over time, so you can see whether your share of AI answers is growing.

Go deeper

See where your site stands

The free AI readiness scan grades your site on the things defined above: crawler access, llms.txt, structured data and more. About 2 minutes, no account needed.

Run the free scan