GEO & AI search

Shared foundation

Definition

Technical and data work — structured data, attribute completeness, site architecture, page performance — that simultaneously improves classic search rankings and AI-assistant citation accuracy. It should be budgeted once, not split across SEO and GEO line items.

Defined in GEO vs. SEO Budget Split: A Decision Framework.

Related terms

Structured data: Markup embedded in a page, such as Product or FAQPage schema, that tells both search engines and AI assistants exactly what a piece of content is, rather than making them infer it.
Citation: An instance of an AI assistant referencing or recommending a specific merchant, product, or piece of content in its response to a user query.
Product schema audit: A scored review of Product (and related Offer / rating / policy) structured data on live product pages, measured as a crawler would read them, against a fixed field checklist weighted for AI shopping usefulness.
Retrieval-augmented answer: An AI response generated by first searching for relevant live pages, then having the model read and synthesize from those specific pages — as opposed to answering purely from training data. Perplexity's shopping answers are retrieval-augmented, which is why what's on your page right now matters more than what a model "knows" about your brand.
Commerce GEO: Generative engine optimization applied to commerce — the practice of structuring a catalog and content so AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity cite and recommend it.
Answer-first structure: Writing the conclusion or direct answer as the first sentence of a section, with supporting reasoning and caveats following it — the inverse of narrative or journalistic structure, which builds to a conclusion.

All 112 terms

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