AI GEO glossary

Short, self-contained definitions. Each entry can stand alone in an AI answer.

AI GEO / Generative Engine Optimization — the practice of making a business, product, or expertise findable, trusted, and cited by AI answer engines. Different from SEO, which optimizes for classical search result ranking.

AEO / Answer Engine Optimization — a near-synonym of AI GEO, sometimes used when the focus is on natural-language answers (Perplexity, ChatGPT web) rather than citations.

Answer engine — a system that returns a synthesized natural-language answer with (or sometimes without) citations. Includes ChatGPT web, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Bing Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Qwen, Baidu 通义 / Wenxin.

Buyer question — a question phrased by a decision-making buyer, not by a marketer. Concrete, specific, industry-scoped. The unit of AI GEO measurement.

Citability — the property of a passage that makes it easy for an AI answer engine to quote it: self-contained, factual, named subject, dated where relevant, no marketing filler.

Coverage — the percentage of buyer questions for which the customer is mentioned or cited in an answer, across a defined set of engines.

Retest — running the same set of buyer questions at least 14 days after delivery to check that visibility is stable, not a one-time artifact.

RAG / Retrieval-Augmented Generation — a pattern where a language model is grounded on retrieved documents at query time. Reduces hallucination for internal-knowledge tasks. Not a substitute for public AI GEO.

Private deployment / On-premise AI — running inference on infrastructure controlled by the customer. Justified by data boundary, compliance, latency SLA, or total cost, not by novelty.

Agent — an AI system that can call tools, read/write systems of record, and take multi-step actions. Requires least-privilege identity and human confirmation for destructive actions.

Model router / LLM gateway — a layer that routes each request to a chosen model based on cost, latency, capability, or region. Enables fallback and cost caps.

Fabricated coverage — a vendor's claim that a customer is cited by an answer engine when the coverage is actually the vendor's own paid or prompt-injected artifact. Detected by an independent 14-day retest.

Lead handoff — the moment an inbound contact converts to a qualified opportunity, with structured fields (industry, website, pain, role, private/agent).

AW36 — a private model maintained by AI Lao Pao (AI老炮), used for internal workflow and enterprise engagements. Not offered as a public API.

AI老炮 / AI Lao Pao — an operator identity with 200+ AI ISV project delivery experience across enterprise AI architecture, private deployment, and AI-driven lead generation. See the account matrix.