// Glossary

GEO glossary.

Plain-English definitions of the terms that show up across audits, retainers, and the Shortlist Index. Aimed at B2B SaaS founders and marketers who want to talk about AI search without the buzzword tax.

Core concepts Metrics AI engines Tactics Ecosystem

// Core concepts

Core concepts

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization): Synonym for GEO, more common in the SEO industry. Same practice, different label.; Some practitioners distinguish AEO as broader (covering all answer surfaces including Google's PAA, AI Overviews, and chat engines) and GEO as narrower (chat engines only). In practice the distinction doesn't matter — the underlying tactics and signals are identical. Authority uses 'GEO' to keep the language consistent.; Related: GEO
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): Practice of getting your brand cited inside AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews.; GEO targets visibility inside generated answers — being named, summarized, quoted, or linked when an AI engine responds to a buyer-intent query. Overlaps with SEO on signals (schema, content depth, link graph) but diverges on measurement, tactics, and the unit of success. SEO targets blue-link rankings; GEO targets citation inside the answer.; Related: AEO, Citation rate, Extractability

// Metrics

Metrics

Buyer-intent prompt: A prompt phrased the way a real buyer would type it during software research.; Examples: 'best CRM for early-stage startups,' 'alternatives to Pipedrive,' 'cheapest accounting software for freelancers.' Buyer-intent prompts are what move pipeline. Generic prompts ('what is a CRM?') don't. Authority's prompt library is structured around 10 buyer-intent archetypes: best-of, alternatives-to, vs-comparison, niche-fit, geo-fit, price-fit, integration-fit, scale-fit, problem-solver, evaluator-prompt.; Related: Citation rate
Citation rate: Percentage of buyer-intent prompts where your brand is named or linked in the AI's response.; The core GEO metric. Sample N relevant prompts per category, run each across the engines you care about, count the % that name your brand. Authority's free Shortlist Score uses 10 prompts × 2 engines = 20 runs per query. The Shortlist Method audit uses 200+ prompts × 5 engines.; Related: Share of voice, Extractability
Share of voice (AI): Your citation rate divided by the citation rate of the top brand in your category.; If HubSpot is cited 80% of the time and you're cited 16%, your share of voice in CRM is 20%. More useful than raw citation rate when the category is dominated by a few players, because it tells you whether you're closing the gap on the leader or just rising with the tide.; Related: Citation rate

// AI engines

AI engines

AI Overviews (Google): Google's AI-generated answer that appears above blue-link results for some queries.; Powered by Gemini, served via SGE then renamed AI Overviews. Citation in AI Overviews requires the same signals as Gemini chat plus standard SEO ranking signals. Coverage is uneven by query type and country. Tracked via SerpApi or direct scraping. Authority tracks AI Overviews citation rate in every audit.; Related: Gemini
ChatGPT (OpenAI): OpenAI's chat interface. Includes browsing/search via web_search tool when enabled.; GPT-4o is the current default. With web_search enabled, ChatGPT cites web sources in responses. Without web_search, it relies on training data — which means citations come from the most-mentioned brands at training cut-off. Authority's measurement always uses gpt-4o + web_search to reflect what real buyers see.; Related: , Perplexity
Claude (Anthropic): Anthropic's AI engine. Sonnet 4.6 is the current default.; Claude has lower buyer-research market share than ChatGPT but rising fast among technical buyers and developers. Web search is available via Claude.ai and the API. Anthropic's safety-tuning means Claude is more conservative about brand recommendations — it's harder to get cited but the citations carry more authority weight.; Related: ChatGPT
Gemini (Google): Google's AI engine. Powers Gemini chat, AI Overviews, and Bard's successor.; Gemini 3-pro is the current public model. Uses google_search as its grounding tool, which gives it tight integration with Google's ranking signals. Citation behavior leans toward authoritative third-party sources (Wikipedia, major listicles, official docs) more than ChatGPT.; Related: AI Overviews
Perplexity: Search-first AI engine that always cites sources inline.; Powered by the Sonar model family. Defaults to web search on every query. Citations appear as inline numbered links. Among AI engines, Perplexity has the highest citation density per response — making it the most concrete signal for GEO measurement. Authority weights Perplexity at 30% of total Shortlist Score.; Related: ChatGPT

// Tactics

Tactics

Earned mention: A reference to your brand on a third-party publication that you didn't pay for or directly control.; Listicles, podcasts, newsletter mentions, conference talks, peer references. Earned mentions are the highest-leverage GEO signal because AI engines treat them as trust-weighted votes. Authority's retainer ships 2–5 earned-mention placements per month via researched outreach to relevant publications, podcasts, and creators.; Related: Listicle
Entity disambiguation: Telling AI engines which entity you are when your brand name overlaps with others.; If your brand is 'Notion,' the engine has to figure out whether the query refers to the SaaS company or the abstract concept. Entity disambiguation uses sameAs links (Wikipedia, Wikidata, LinkedIn, Crunchbase), schema markup (@type, @id), and consistent naming across the web to anchor your brand to one specific entity. Without disambiguation, AI engines often skip you to avoid the wrong attribution.; Related: Schema markup, Knowledge graph
Extractability: Whether a page contains the specific facts an AI engine needs to answer the query, in a form it can pull cleanly.; An extractable page has: schema markup that names entities, a clear question/answer structure, factual claims with numbers or dates, and primary sources. AI engines reward extractability because it lowers their summarization cost. Marketing-speak pages with no specifics are inextractable even if they rank #1 on Google.; Related: Schema markup, Entity disambiguation
Knowledge graph: A structured database of entities and the relationships between them, used by search and AI engines.; Google's knowledge graph, Wikidata, and proprietary AI engine graphs all anchor brand entities to verified facts. Being present in major knowledge graphs (Wikipedia, Wikidata, Crunchbase) is one of the strongest GEO signals because it short-circuits the engine's verification process.; Related: Entity disambiguation
Listicle: A 'best X for Y' article, typically on a third-party publication.; The single most-cited content type in B2B SaaS GEO. AI engines pull listicles disproportionately because they're structured as comparison data — exactly the format engines need to answer 'best X' queries. Authority's earned-mention placements target the top 10 listicles in each client's category.; Related: Earned mention
Schema markup: Structured data (JSON-LD) on a page that names what the page is, who made it, and how it relates to other entities.; Originally a Google ranking signal, now a major GEO signal too. AI engines use schema to verify entity claims and reduce summarization risk. Authority audits schema implementation on the top 10 pages of every audit and ships fixes on the retainer. The most impactful types for B2B SaaS: Organization, Product, Service, Person, FAQPage, Article, BreadcrumbList.; Related: Entity disambiguation, Extractability

// Ecosystem

Ecosystem

Athena: Another AI visibility monitoring tool. Same category as Profound and Peec AI.; Athena Intelligence positions on enterprise market intelligence + AI search visibility. Used by larger marketing teams. Authority does not directly compete — we're a service, not a tool.; Related: Profound, Peec AI
Peec AI: AI visibility monitoring tool, similar category to Profound.; European-headquartered competitor to Profound. Hosted dashboard for tracking brand citation across AI engines. Comparable feature set; pricing in the same range. Direct comparison: /vs/peec-ai.; Related: Profound, Athena
Profound: AI search visibility monitoring tool. Direct comparison: /vs/profound, /lp/profound-alternative.; Profound tracks brand citation across AI engines in a hosted dashboard. Used by enterprise marketing teams who have internal capacity to ship the recommendations themselves. Authority is a service alternative for teams without that capacity.; Related: Peec AI, Athena
The Shortlist Index: Authority's free public weekly leaderboard of AI citation rankings for B2B SaaS.; Published at authority.as/shortlist-index. Methodology-transparent and reproducible — anyone can run the same prompts and verify the scores. Refreshed weekly. Initial categories: CRM, Project Management, Customer Support, Analytics, Sales Engagement.; Related: The Shortlist Method, The Shortlist Score
The Shortlist Method: Authority's productized GEO service: $1,490 audit + $2,490–$6,490/mo retainer.; Two products. Audit is one-time, 5 days, with a 90-day roadmap. Retainer ships the work — content, schema, earned mentions, weekly tracking. Same methodology used to publish The Shortlist Index publicly. Authority does not customize scope per client; everyone gets the same work, just at different volumes.; Related: The Shortlist Index, The Shortlist Score
The Shortlist Score: Free 90-second tool at authority.as/score. 10 buyer-intent prompts × 2 engines = your AI citation rate.; Returns a 5-page PDF report: citation rate, top cited competitors, 5 specific things you can do this week. Limited to 5 runs per email per day. Same methodology as the audit, smaller sample size.; Related: The Shortlist Method, The Shortlist Index

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Core concepts

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)

Synonym for GEO, more common in the SEO industry. Same practice, different label.

Some practitioners distinguish AEO as broader (covering all answer surfaces including Google's PAA, AI Overviews, and chat engines) and GEO as narrower (chat engines only). In practice the distinction doesn't matter — the underlying tactics and signals are identical. Authority uses 'GEO' to keep the language consistent.

Related: GEO

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)

Practice of getting your brand cited inside AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews.

GEO targets visibility inside generated answers — being named, summarized, quoted, or linked when an AI engine responds to a buyer-intent query. Overlaps with SEO on signals (schema, content depth, link graph) but diverges on measurement, tactics, and the unit of success. SEO targets blue-link rankings; GEO targets citation inside the answer.

Related: AEO, Citation rate, Extractability

Metrics

Buyer-intent prompt

A prompt phrased the way a real buyer would type it during software research.

Examples: 'best CRM for early-stage startups,' 'alternatives to Pipedrive,' 'cheapest accounting software for freelancers.' Buyer-intent prompts are what move pipeline. Generic prompts ('what is a CRM?') don't. Authority's prompt library is structured around 10 buyer-intent archetypes: best-of, alternatives-to, vs-comparison, niche-fit, geo-fit, price-fit, integration-fit, scale-fit, problem-solver, evaluator-prompt.

Related: Citation rate

Citation rate

Percentage of buyer-intent prompts where your brand is named or linked in the AI's response.

The core GEO metric. Sample N relevant prompts per category, run each across the engines you care about, count the % that name your brand. Authority's free Shortlist Score uses 10 prompts × 2 engines = 20 runs per query. The Shortlist Method audit uses 200+ prompts × 5 engines.

Related: Share of voice, Extractability

AI engines

AI Overviews (Google)

Google's AI-generated answer that appears above blue-link results for some queries.

Powered by Gemini, served via SGE then renamed AI Overviews. Citation in AI Overviews requires the same signals as Gemini chat plus standard SEO ranking signals. Coverage is uneven by query type and country. Tracked via SerpApi or direct scraping. Authority tracks AI Overviews citation rate in every audit.

Related: Gemini

ChatGPT (OpenAI)

OpenAI's chat interface. Includes browsing/search via web_search tool when enabled.

GPT-4o is the current default. With web_search enabled, ChatGPT cites web sources in responses. Without web_search, it relies on training data — which means citations come from the most-mentioned brands at training cut-off. Authority's measurement always uses gpt-4o + web_search to reflect what real buyers see.

Related: , Perplexity

Claude (Anthropic)

Anthropic's AI engine. Sonnet 4.6 is the current default.

Claude has lower buyer-research market share than ChatGPT but rising fast among technical buyers and developers. Web search is available via Claude.ai and the API. Anthropic's safety-tuning means Claude is more conservative about brand recommendations — it's harder to get cited but the citations carry more authority weight.

Related: ChatGPT

Gemini (Google)

Google's AI engine. Powers Gemini chat, AI Overviews, and Bard's successor.

Gemini 3-pro is the current public model. Uses google_search as its grounding tool, which gives it tight integration with Google's ranking signals. Citation behavior leans toward authoritative third-party sources (Wikipedia, major listicles, official docs) more than ChatGPT.

Related: AI Overviews

Perplexity

Search-first AI engine that always cites sources inline.

Powered by the Sonar model family. Defaults to web search on every query. Citations appear as inline numbered links. Among AI engines, Perplexity has the highest citation density per response — making it the most concrete signal for GEO measurement. Authority weights Perplexity at 30% of total Shortlist Score.

Related: ChatGPT

Tactics

Earned mention

A reference to your brand on a third-party publication that you didn't pay for or directly control.

Listicles, podcasts, newsletter mentions, conference talks, peer references. Earned mentions are the highest-leverage GEO signal because AI engines treat them as trust-weighted votes. Authority's retainer ships 2–5 earned-mention placements per month via researched outreach to relevant publications, podcasts, and creators.

Related: Listicle

Entity disambiguation

Telling AI engines which entity you are when your brand name overlaps with others.

If your brand is 'Notion,' the engine has to figure out whether the query refers to the SaaS company or the abstract concept. Entity disambiguation uses sameAs links (Wikipedia, Wikidata, LinkedIn, Crunchbase), schema markup (@type, @id), and consistent naming across the web to anchor your brand to one specific entity. Without disambiguation, AI engines often skip you to avoid the wrong attribution.

Related: Schema markup, Knowledge graph

Extractability

Whether a page contains the specific facts an AI engine needs to answer the query, in a form it can pull cleanly.

An extractable page has: schema markup that names entities, a clear question/answer structure, factual claims with numbers or dates, and primary sources. AI engines reward extractability because it lowers their summarization cost. Marketing-speak pages with no specifics are inextractable even if they rank #1 on Google.

Knowledge graph

A structured database of entities and the relationships between them, used by search and AI engines.

Google's knowledge graph, Wikidata, and proprietary AI engine graphs all anchor brand entities to verified facts. Being present in major knowledge graphs (Wikipedia, Wikidata, Crunchbase) is one of the strongest GEO signals because it short-circuits the engine's verification process.

Related: Entity disambiguation

Listicle

A 'best X for Y' article, typically on a third-party publication.

The single most-cited content type in B2B SaaS GEO. AI engines pull listicles disproportionately because they're structured as comparison data — exactly the format engines need to answer 'best X' queries. Authority's earned-mention placements target the top 10 listicles in each client's category.

Related: Earned mention

Schema markup

Structured data (JSON-LD) on a page that names what the page is, who made it, and how it relates to other entities.

Originally a Google ranking signal, now a major GEO signal too. AI engines use schema to verify entity claims and reduce summarization risk. Authority audits schema implementation on the top 10 pages of every audit and ships fixes on the retainer. The most impactful types for B2B SaaS: Organization, Product, Service, Person, FAQPage, Article, BreadcrumbList.

Ecosystem

Athena

Another AI visibility monitoring tool. Same category as Profound and Peec AI.

Athena Intelligence positions on enterprise market intelligence + AI search visibility. Used by larger marketing teams. Authority does not directly compete — we're a service, not a tool.

Related: Profound, Peec AI

Peec AI

AI visibility monitoring tool, similar category to Profound.

European-headquartered competitor to Profound. Hosted dashboard for tracking brand citation across AI engines. Comparable feature set; pricing in the same range. Direct comparison: /vs/peec-ai.

Related: Profound, Athena

Profound

AI search visibility monitoring tool. Direct comparison: /vs/profound, /lp/profound-alternative.

Profound tracks brand citation across AI engines in a hosted dashboard. Used by enterprise marketing teams who have internal capacity to ship the recommendations themselves. Authority is a service alternative for teams without that capacity.

Related: Peec AI, Athena

The Shortlist Index

Authority's free public weekly leaderboard of AI citation rankings for B2B SaaS.

Published at authority.as/shortlist-index. Methodology-transparent and reproducible — anyone can run the same prompts and verify the scores. Refreshed weekly. Initial categories: CRM, Project Management, Customer Support, Analytics, Sales Engagement.

The Shortlist Method

Authority's productized GEO service: $1,490 audit + $2,490–$6,490/mo retainer.

Two products. Audit is one-time, 5 days, with a 90-day roadmap. Retainer ships the work — content, schema, earned mentions, weekly tracking. Same methodology used to publish The Shortlist Index publicly. Authority does not customize scope per client; everyone gets the same work, just at different volumes.

The Shortlist Score

Free 90-second tool at authority.as/score. 10 buyer-intent prompts × 2 engines = your AI citation rate.

Returns a 5-page PDF report: citation rate, top cited competitors, 5 specific things you can do this week. Limited to 5 runs per email per day. Same methodology as the audit, smaller sample size.