GEO & AI Search Glossary
Plain-English definitions for the AI search era — GEO, AEO, agentic commerce and the technical SEO terms behind them, written by a team that ships this work daily.
301 Redirect
A 301 redirect permanently forwards one URL to another, passing users and most ranking equity to the destination — the core tool of safe migrations.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is the discipline of structuring content so that answer engines — featured snippets, voice assistants and AI chatbots — can lift a complete, correct answer directly from your page.
Agentic Checkout
Agentic checkout lets an AI assistant complete a purchase for the user — assembling the cart, applying the buyer's saved details and paying — without the user visiting the storefront.
Agentic Commerce
Agentic commerce is shopping executed by AI agents on a user's behalf — comparing products, selecting options and completing checkout — rather than by the user browsing a storefront.
AI Agent
An AI agent is software that pursues a goal autonomously — planning steps, using tools, browsing and transacting — rather than answering a single prompt.
AI Citation
An AI citation is a source link or attribution inside an AI-generated answer — the AI-era equivalent of ranking #1, because it is the only path from the answer back to your site.
AI Crawler
An AI crawler is a bot that fetches web content for AI systems — either to train models (GPTBot, ClaudeBot) or to retrieve live answers for users (OAI-SearchBot, Perplexity-User).
AOV (Average Order Value)
AOV (Average Order Value) is revenue divided by number of orders — the lever that grows revenue without growing traffic.
Canonical URL
A canonical URL is the version of a page you declare as authoritative when multiple URLs serve the same content, consolidating ranking signals onto one address.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are Google's user-experience metrics — LCP (loading), INP (interactivity) and CLS (visual stability) — measured on real users and used as a ranking signal.
Crawl Budget
Crawl budget is the number of URLs a search engine will crawl on your site within a period — a finite resource that large or messy sites can exhaust on worthless URLs.
CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization)
CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) is the systematic practice of increasing the share of visitors who buy — through research, hypothesis-driven changes and controlled testing.
E-E-A-T
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness — Google's framework for judging whether content and its source deserve visibility.
FAQ Schema
FAQ schema is schema.org FAQPage markup that pairs each question with its answer in machine-readable form, making the page eligible for FAQ rich results and easy for AI engines to quote.
Featured Snippet
A featured snippet is the highlighted answer box at the top of Google results, extracted from a page that answers the query directly.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the practice of optimizing a brand's content, data and citations so that generative AI engines — ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity — mention, cite and recommend it in their answers.
Google AI Mode
Google AI Mode is Google Search's conversational interface — a full-page AI experience where users ask follow-up questions and Google composes answers with query fan-out across its index.
Google AI Overviews
Google AI Overviews are AI-generated summary answers that appear above traditional results on Google, synthesized from multiple sources with citation links.
Headless Commerce
Headless commerce separates the storefront front end from the commerce back end, connecting them by APIs so each can evolve independently.
hreflang
hreflang is the link annotation that tells search engines which language and regional versions of a page exist, so each user is served the right version.
Hydrogen
Hydrogen is Shopify's React-based framework for building headless storefronts, paired with Oxygen, Shopify's edge hosting for Hydrogen apps.
Internal Linking
Internal linking is how pages on your own site link to each other — the mechanism that distributes authority, defines topical structure and guides both crawlers and shoppers.
llms.txt
llms.txt is a proposed standard file at a site's root that gives large language models a concise, curated guide to the site's most important content and facts.
LTV (Customer Lifetime Value)
LTV (Customer Lifetime Value) is the total profit a customer generates across their relationship with the brand — the ceiling on what you can afford to spend acquiring them.
MCP (Model Context Protocol)
MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard that lets AI assistants connect to external tools and data sources through a common interface, instead of bespoke integrations per model.
Online Store 2.0
Online Store 2.0 is Shopify's theme architecture that brought sections on every page, app blocks and metafield-driven content to standard themes.
Product Schema
Product schema is the schema.org markup describing a product — name, image, brand, price, availability, ratings — that powers rich results and feeds AI shopping answers.
SERP
SERP (Search Engine Results Page) is the page returned for a query — now a layered surface of AI answers, ads, shopping units, maps, videos and classic organic links.
Structured Data
Structured data is machine-readable markup (usually JSON-LD using schema.org vocabulary) that states exactly what a page is — product, price, review, FAQ, organization — so machines don't have to guess.
Zero-Click Search
Zero-click search describes queries resolved directly on the results page — via AI Overviews, featured snippets or knowledge panels — without the user clicking any result.