GEO glossary
New vocabulary, much of it still unsettled.
Terms used in generative engine optimisation, defined as precisely as the field currently allows. Where something is contested or oversold, that is said rather than smoothed over.
Planned
SearchDone does not measure AI visibility yet. This glossary explains the concepts the product is being built around, not features you can use today.
Answer engine
Responds instead of listing
- A system that answers a question directly rather than returning a list of links — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and Google's AI Overviews. The commercial consequence is that a user can get what they came for without visiting anyone's website.
Citation
Being named as a source
- When an answer engine attributes part of its response to a specific page or brand. The nearest equivalent to a ranking in this world, though unlike a ranking it is not stable, not ordered, and not guaranteed to be shown the same way twice.
Entity
A thing, not a phrase
- A distinct real-world thing — a company, product, person, place — that a system can reason about and relate to other things. Answer engines resolve queries to entities, so being unambiguous about what you are matters more here than keyword phrasing ever did.
GEO
Generative engine optimisation
- Work aimed at being cited by answer engines. The measurement is genuinely distinct from SEO — being cited is a different event from ranking — but most of the underlying work overlaps: clear claims, sound structure, real entities, sources that check out.
Grounding
Answers tied to sources
- When a model's answer is anchored to retrieved documents rather than produced from its training alone. Grounded answers are where citations come from, which is why being retrievable and quotable is the practical goal.
Hallucination
Confident and wrong
- A model stating something false as fact. Relevant twice over: engines can describe your business incorrectly, and any tool generating content for your site can invent claims. The second is why SearchDone puts a fact gate in front of anything published.
Prompt panel
A tracked set of questions
- A fixed set of commercially relevant prompts checked on a schedule across engines, so visibility is measured as a trend rather than a one-off. A single check is close to noise, because answers vary between sessions, regions and model versions.
Retrieval
Fetching before answering
- The step where a system searches for relevant documents to answer with. If your page is never retrieved it can never be cited, which makes conventional discoverability a prerequisite for GEO rather than an alternative to it.
Zero-click
Answered without a visit
- A search satisfied without anyone clicking through. Long predates AI — featured snippets did this for years — but answer engines accelerate it, which is why impressions and clicks alone are becoming an incomplete picture of visibility.
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