Glossary
GEO and AIGEO glossary
25 terms that come up when beauty suppliers work on AI visibility — defined in one or two sentences each, so people and AI engines can quote them accurately.
- Generative engine optimization (GEO)
- Structuring a company's facts, evidence and content so that AI answer engines can find, verify and cite it when a user asks a question the company should be the answer to. Named in a 2024 paper by Aggarwal et al. (Princeton and collaborators, KDD 2024).
- AIGEO
- A term used mainly in China's marketing industry for generative engine optimization. It means the same as GEO; the "AI" prefix makes clear the work is about AI engines, not geography. BeautyGEO uses GEO and AIGEO interchangeably.
- Answer engine optimization (AEO)
- An older name for optimising content to be used as a direct answer — first by search snippets and voice assistants, now by AI assistants. In practice it overlaps almost completely with GEO.
- LLM SEO
- Informal name for making content visible to large language models. Same practice as GEO.
- AI answer engine
- An AI system that composes an answer and names sources, rather than returning a list of links: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, and in China Doubao, DeepSeek, Tencent Yuanbao, Kimi, ERNIE Bot and Qwen.
- AI Overviews
- AI-generated summaries shown at the top of some Google search results, built from Google's search index.
- AI Mode
- Google's conversational search experience, also built on Google Search.
- Citation
- A source link or reference an AI answer attaches to a statement. Being cited is how a supplier's own page gets credit for an answer.
- Mention
- Being named in an AI answer, with or without a citation.
- Share of answers
- BeautyGEO's core metric: the percentage of a fixed set of buyer prompts, per engine, in which a company is named — reported with its average position.
- Prompt set
- A fixed list of real buyer questions agreed before work starts and re-tested on a schedule, so progress can be measured honestly.
- Fan-out query
- A search the AI engine runs behind the scenes to answer a prompt. ChatGPT often rewrites a buyer's prompt into shorter search queries before choosing sources.
- Entity
- A uniquely identifiable thing — for GEO, your company. Engines must be sure that the site, listings and mentions all describe the same entity.
- Structured data (schema.org)
- Machine-readable labels in a page's code — Organization, Product, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList — that tell engines what the page describes.
- llms.txt
- A plain-text summary of a site for AI systems, placed at /llms.txt. Useful for agents; Google says it is not needed for AI Overviews.
- IndexNow
- An open protocol that lets a site notify Bing and other engines instantly when a URL is added or changed.
- OAI-SearchBot
- OpenAI's crawler for ChatGPT search. Separate from GPTBot, which collects training data.
- PerplexityBot
- Perplexity's crawler for its search index.
- Claude-SearchBot
- Anthropic's crawler for Claude's web search. Separate from ClaudeBot, which collects training data.
- Google-Extended
- A robots.txt token that controls use of content for Gemini training and grounding. It does not affect inclusion in Google Search.
- OEM / ODM
- Original equipment manufacturer (makes to the brand's formula and design) / original design manufacturer (also supplies the formula or design). Core buyer terms in beauty sourcing prompts.
- MOQ
- Minimum order quantity — the number most often quoted by AI engines when recommending beauty suppliers.
- ISO 22716
- The international Good Manufacturing Practice standard for cosmetics — one of the certifications buyers name in sourcing prompts.
- MoCRA
- The US Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act of 2022, which requires facility registration and product listing for cosmetics sold in the US.
- PCR
- Post-consumer recycled resin — a packaging attribute buyers increasingly specify, often with a percentage.
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