Glossary

Definitions with a stance, and a number in them where one exists. Not Wikipedia paraphrase.

• AEO
  Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of formatting pages so answer engines can lift a complete, self-contained response straight from them.
• Crawl budget
  Crawl budget is the amount of crawling a search engine or AI bot allocates to a site, set by server health, perceived value, and content freshness.
• Dark AI traffic
  Dark AI traffic is AI-driven visits that arrive without referrer data, so analytics files them under direct. What it hides and how to measure it.
• E-E-A-T
  E-E-A-T is Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust — the framework in Google's quality rater guidelines. Evidence to show, not a score to chase.
• GEO
  Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is structuring a website so AI engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini — retrieve and cite its pages in their answers.
• Information gain
  Information gain is the measurable new information a page adds beyond what already sits in a model's corpus — and why it decides who gets cited.
• Query fan-out
  Query fan-out is how an AI engine splits one prompt into several synthetic sub-queries, retrieves results for each, then composes one cited answer.
• Topical authority
  Topical authority is a site's earned status as a default source on a subject: depth of coverage, accumulated performance history, low cost of retrieval.