Reference

Glossary. Verifiable definitions.

Eighteen terms defined without presenting a proposal, constructed metric or emerging practice as an established standard.

Updated 12 August 2026 8 min read

18

Discipline

AEO

Answer Engine Optimization

A set of practices intended to make an answer easy for an answer engine to extract and present. The term has no standard definition and its scope often overlaps with SEO and GEO.

Product

AI Overviews

A Google Search feature that may show an AI-generated summary with links to sources. A page needs no special markup beyond ordinary Google Search requirements to be eligible.

Primary source or specification: Google Search documentation
Architecture

Chunking

Splitting a document into segments used during indexing or retrieval. The appropriate size depends on the content, embedding model, retrieval system and user need.

Web measurement

Core Web Vitals

A set of three field user-experience metrics: LCP for loading, INP for responsiveness and CLS for visual stability. They do not measure editorial quality.

Primary source or specification: web.dev documentation
Semantics

Entity

An identifiable object to which properties or relationships can be assigned, such as an organisation, person, product or concept. Explicit context and identifiers reduce ambiguity.

Quality

Evaluation

Eval

A reproducible procedure that measures an expected AI-system behaviour on a set of cases. A useful evaluation describes the data, criterion, model, settings and limitations.

Primary source or specification: OpenAI Evals guide
Discipline

GEO

Generative Engine Optimization

A name used for optimising visibility in generative answers. A KDD 2024 research paper studied several methods in an experimental environment, without establishing a citation guarantee for commercial engines.

Primary source or specification: GEO paper, arXiv 2311.09735
Structured data

JSON-LD

A JSON syntax for expressing linked data. On the web, it is notably used to embed Schema.org vocabulary in an HTML page.

Primary source or specification: W3C JSON-LD 1.1 specification
Umbrella term

LLM Optimization

LLMO

An ambiguous expression that can refer to optimising an LLM application, a model, costs, evaluations, or content visibility in AI answers. The context should identify the discipline.

Primary source or specification: Five-disciplines framework
Proposal

llms.txt

A proposed Markdown format for presenting a selected set of site resources to models. It is neither a web standard nor a guaranteed search-engine directive.

Primary source or specification: llms.txt proposal
Protocol

MCP

Model Context Protocol

An open protocol that standardises how an AI application can connect to data sources, tools and workflows. It does not by itself determine an integration's permissions or security.

Primary source or specification: MCP documentation
Crawler

OAI-SearchBot

An OpenAI crawler associated with search in ChatGPT. OpenAI distinguishes it from GPTBot, related to training, and ChatGPT-User, used for certain user-initiated actions.

Primary source or specification: OpenAI bots documentation
Performance

Prompt caching

A mechanism that reuses computation associated with an identical prompt prefix. Its effects on cost and latency depend on the provider, model and cache-retention rules.

Primary source or specification: OpenAI Prompt Caching guide
Model

Quantization

A technique that represents weights or activations at lower numerical precision to reduce memory or compute cost. Gains and quality loss must be measured for each model and task.

Primary source or specification: Hugging Face documentation
Architecture

RAG

Retrieval-Augmented Generation

An architecture that retrieves documents or passages before generation to provide context to the model. Its quality depends on the corpus, indexing, retrieval and end-to-end evaluation.

Primary source or specification: Original RAG paper
Web protocol

robots.txt

A file that tells compliant crawlers which resources they may crawl. The protocol is not an access-control mechanism and does not guarantee that a URL will not be indexed.

Primary source or specification: RFC 9309
Vocabulary

Schema.org

A shared vocabulary for describing entities and their properties in structured data. It helps machines interpret a page but guarantees neither a rich result nor an AI citation.

Primary source or specification: Schema.org documentation
Measurement

Share of AI Voice

A constructed metric for tracking a brand or source across a defined panel of AI answers. It is comparable over time only when queries, engines, settings, dates and counting rules are retained.