SEO, AEO and GEO glossary

The three disciplines

SEO (search engine optimisation)

Being found, crawled, indexed and ranked well in search engines' results. See SEO.

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)

Being named and cited in AI engines' answers (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Grok, Meta AI). See AEO.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)

Being recommended by generative engines, with consistent facts and third-party sources that talk about you. See GEO.

AI visibility

Tracked prompt

A question asked as written to the AI engines at each observation. Its language and country travel in its text: no country parameter is sent. See prompts.

Prompt group

A set of tracked prompts, with its engines, its listed competitors and its budget; the default group is created by the analysis. See AI prompt groups.

AI engine

An assistant NeoRank queries, depending on the engines enabled and verified on the platform: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Grok and Meta AI. Only verified engines are queried.

Observation

A run: each active prompt is asked to each engine of the group, then the answers are parsed. It is “finished”, “partial” (an engine failed) or failed. See how an observation runs.

Mention

Your brand (site name or domain, as whole words) named in an answer; one brand mention per answer at most. Competitors are looked for only if they are listed. See mentions and citations.

Citation

A URL written out in an answer. It is attributed to your site, a competitor or a third-party source by its domain; NeoRank does not open the cited URL.

AI share of voice

Your mentions divided by your mentions plus the tracked competitors', over the last three finished or partial observations. While fewer than two brands are named, it is not computed and shows “—”. See share of voice.

Weighted share

Share of voice where an entity named in position n is worth 1 ÷ n: being named first counts more.

GEO score

Share of voice shown out of 100 in the header. See the GEO score.

Recommendation

An answer containing recommending wording and positive sentiment near your brand.

Sentiment

The tone of the excerpts naming your brand, classified positive, neutral or negative by a lexicon of French and English words. See the sentiment card.

AI Overview

The summary Google generates at the top of some results. NeoRank never queries Google itself: it relies on your manual readings and, where enabled, on a licensed SERP data provider.

AI crawlers

The AI engines' crawlers (GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended) whose access NeoRank reads in your robots.txt. See the “AI-ready” tiles.

llms.txt

A proposed convention: a Markdown file at the root that introduces the site to language models. NeoRank checks that it exists and can generate a draft; no engine commits to reading it. See AI crawler access.

AI traffic share

With GA4 connected, the sessions whose GA4 source is exactly a known AI engine's address (for example chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai) or its name as utm_source, over all sessions across 28 days. It is a floor. See traffic from AI.

Google search

Google Search Console

Google's service reporting your site's impressions, clicks, CTR and positions. NeoRank reads it read-only once connected. See Integrations.

Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

Google's audience measurement service; NeoRank reads its sessions and channels read-only.

Impressions, clicks, CTR

How many times Google showed your site in its results, how many times people clicked, and the ratio of the two — as Search Console reports them, with a 2 to 3 day delay.

Average position

The impression-weighted Search Console position over the last 28 reported days — an average, not a dated check. With no impression in 28 days, the 90-day average is shown, marked “90 d”. See where the position comes from.

Demand signal

Your site's Search Console impressions for a query over the last 28 reported days. It is not a market search volume; when absent it shows “—”, never 0. See Keyword research.

Estimated intent

A query's intent inferred from its text by a heuristic, marked “estimated”: an estimate, not a measurement.

IndexNow

A protocol that notifies the engines using it of your new or changed URLs, once a key is hosted and verified on your domain. Set per site in Settings › Accelerated indexing, included in paid plans.

Site health and authority

Technical score

Each page starts at 100 and loses 15 points per error, 8 per warning and 3 per notice; the site score is the rounded average of the pages. See the score.

Core Web Vitals

Google's speed and stability indicators, read from the PageSpeed Insights API (field data when Google has it, otherwise a lab measurement). See Core Web Vitals.

Backlink

A link from an external page to your site. NeoRank lists those found in its own crawl corpus and the Common Crawl archives — partial coverage. See the native corpus.

Referring domain

A host containing at least one link to you; www and each subdomain count separately.

NeoRank authority score

A 0 to 100 score drawn from your domain's harmonic-centrality rank in the Common Crawl web graph. See the authority score.

Disavow draft

A file prepared from the spam signals, to review before any upload to Google. See the disavow draft.

Reading the figures

Not measured

NeoRank has no measurement for this value: source not connected, not read yet, or absent from the product. It is never a zero. See “Not measured”.

Estimate

A computed market value, always shown apart from your site's measurements and named as such. See Measurements and estimates.

Alert

A signal raised by a measurement: Search Console clicks anomaly or position drop, GA4 sessions drop, new technical anomalies or measured traffic decline between two analyses. See alerts.

Continuous monitoring

The daily checks of the synced Search Console and GA4 data, and the comparison of each analysis with the previous one, which produce the alerts. See Alerts and observations.

The product

Organisation, workspace, site

The organisation holds the subscription; it contains workspaces, which group sites and members with a role. See roles.

Auto-Fix (automatic fixes)

Fixes NeoRank proposes and applies to your site only after your approval, then verifies and lets you undo. Available where the platform has switched it on. See Auto-Fix.

Neo AI

The dashboard's analyst assistant, answering from the site's measured data; switched on per platform. See Neo AI.

API key

A secret that authenticates your calls to the read-only REST API v1; shown once, revocable. See keys.

MCP (Model Context Protocol)

A protocol that lets an AI assistant (Claude, Cursor…) call tools. NeoRank's MCP server exposes read-only tools. See the MCP server.

A term missing? The documentation and the help centre detail every dashboard view.