Glossary
Glossary of answer engine optimization
Definitions Named North uses for answer engine optimization, including AEO, GEO, named source, entity clarity, llms.txt, and citation share.
AI Overview
An AI Overview is a generated summary shown in a search result, often with citations, rather than only the classic list of links.
AI visibility
AI visibility is the degree to which answer engines accurately name a company when people ask questions the company should be in.
Answer engine
An answer engine is a system that returns a written answer, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity, or a Google AI Overview, rather than only a list of links.
Answer engine optimization
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring a company's public facts so answer engines can retrieve them, trust them, and name the company in an answer.
Crawler policy
A crawler policy is the set of robots.txt rules, and the public statement beside them, that say which automated agents may fetch a site.
Entity clarity
Entity clarity is the agreement, across pages and profiles, of who an organization is, what it does, and how it should be described.
Extractable passage
An extractable passage is a self-contained block of text, usually opening with the answer, that a system can quote without the surrounding page.
Generative engine optimization
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the work of improving how a brand appears in generative answers; Named North treats it as part of answer engine optimization, not as a separate service.
LLM citation
An LLM citation is a case where a large language model names a source, or points to it, for a claim in its answer.
llms.txt
llms.txt is a plain-text file at a site’s root that summarizes the site for language models and links to the canonical pages.
Named source
A named source is a company an answer engine mentions by name when it answers a question.
Retrieval-augmented generation
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a pattern in which a model fetches documents and then writes an answer from those documents.
Structured data
Structured data is machine-readable markup, usually JSON-LD using schema.org, that restates facts already visible on the page.